A federal judge in Florida will hold a hearing Friday to set a new trial date for former President Donald J. Trump on charges of mishandling classified documents, a move that will likely have major ramifications for his legal and political future.
The judge, Aileen M. Cannon, has already said she is willing to make some “reasonable adjustments” to the timing of the trial, which for now, at least, is set to begin May 20 in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce. , Florida. Several rulings by Judge Cannon in recent months about the pace of the case have made it nearly impossible for the trial to begin as planned.
What remains to be seen is how much of a delay Judge Cannon ends up imposing.
On Thursday afternoon, Mr. Trump’s lawyers and prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith sent Judge Cannon their suggestions for when the trial should begin.
Mr. Smith’s legal team, sticking to its longstanding position that it is trying to hold the trial before Election Day, has asked for a date of July 8. But after months of trying to delay the trial until next year, Mr Trump’s lawyers suddenly reversed themselves. and suggested a date of August 12.
The hearing before Judge Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by Mr. Trump in his final days in office, comes days after a Supreme Court ruling raised the possibility that the former president will not be tried before Election Day in the other federal his case – the one in which he is accused of plotting to subvert the 2020 election.
The justices agreed to decide whether Mr. Trump has immunity from prosecution on the election meddling charges, scheduling arguments for late April and keeping the lower court proceedings frozen until the matter is resolved. In practical terms, the High Court’s decision to take up the case meant the election trial was unlikely to start before September, in the heat of the general election campaign.
Judge Cannon’s decision on whether to go with a July date, an August date or something later in the documents case could also affect the timing of the election case. Mr Trump is expected to attend the hearing on Friday.
It was unclear why Mr. Trump’s legal team said it would be open for August after long trying to delay the trial until next year. But one possibility was that the lawyers, by proposing to spend much of the late summer and early fall in court on the classified documents case, were trying to reduce the chances that there would be time for the election case to be heard before Election Day .
Just months ago, it looked like Mr. Trump would spend much of 2024 in front of a jury, fending off four different criminal charges in four different cities.
At this point, however, only one of his criminal trials has a firm start date. Last month, a state judge in Manhattan set March 25 to begin his trial on charges of arranging hush money payments to a porn star in an effort to avoid a scandal on the eve of the 2016 election.
Mr. Trump’s fourth criminal case, in which he is accused of tampering with election results in Georgia, has yet to go to trial. There is turmoil right now as a judge in Fulton County considers whether to disqualify Fani T. Willis, the district attorney who filed the indictment, from the case over allegations of financial misconduct related to a romantic relationship she had with one of its deputies.
The hearing in Florida, which is scheduled to last most of Friday, will touch on more than scheduling issues.
Judge Cannon asked the defense and prosecution to be prepared to discuss Mr. Trump’s unusually broad and highly politicized motion for additional discovery, which was filed in January. In the motion, the former president’s lawyers suggested that, as part of their defense in the trial, they intended to argue that federal officials — chief among them those in the intelligence community — were “politically motivated and biased” against Mr. Trump.
The parties are also to discuss an attempt by Mr. Smith to keep under seal the names of about a dozen potential witnesses who could testify at trial.
Judge Cannon briefly agreed to a request by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to include the names of the witnesses in public court testimony. But she put that decision on hold after Mr Smith accused her of making a “clear mistake” and said witnesses could face threats or harassment if their identities were revealed.
Even amid debate over these other matters, the question of the timing of the trial was arguably paramount.
If Judge Cannon postpones the proceedings until next year, she would likely face a tidal wave of criticism. It is possible that it could also trigger Mr Smith’s first appeal since the indictment was returned in June, although decisions relating to planning matters are generally not subject to challenge in higher courts.
When Judge Cannon was randomly assigned to the case last spring, she was already under fire for having issued a ruling in an early part of the investigation that was favorable to Mr. Trump but so legally questionable that an appeals court reprimanded her for overturning .
After the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, for classified documents in August 2022, Judge Cannon appointed an independent arbitrator to determine whether any of the material collected by the agents were privileged and should be kept out of the hands of investigators.
But he followed that relatively formal ruling with another that was completely unheard of, effectively freezing the administration’s investigation of Mr. Trump until the arbitrator, known as an expert, completes his work.
Prosecutors were outraged by the move, accusing Judge Cannon not only of not having the power to enter the case so extraordinarily, but also of treating Mr. Trump differently than a normal criminal defendant.
A federal appeals court in Atlanta eventually agreed, unanimously overturning its decision and noting that it appeared to have granted a “special exception” to Mr Trump in defiance of the “fundamental principle of our nation that our law applies to everyone”.
But in some of her more recent rulings, Justice Cannon has shown herself willing to belittle Mr. Trump.
On Wednesday, for example, he denied a highly unusual request from his lawyers to access a secret government file detailing a trove of classified evidence that prosecutors said was neither helpful nor relevant to his defense.
If Judge Cannon had allowed the request, legal experts said, it would have been well outside the normal procedures set out in the Classified Procedures Act, the federal law governing the use of classified material in public trials.
But even as he ruled against Mr. Trump, Judge Cannon seemed to imply that he was different from most accused criminals. He did not fully agree with Mr Smith’s position that the facts in this case did not “remotely justify a departure from the normal procedure”.
“The court,” he wrote, “cannot speak with such certainty in this first criminal prosecution of a former president of the United States — who was once the nation’s primary classification authority for many of the documents the special counsel is now trying to hide”.
