A federal judge in Florida will hold a hearing Friday to set a new date for former President Donald J. Trump’s trial on charges of mishandling confidential documents, a move that is likely to have significant consequences for his legal and political future.
Judge Aileen M. Cannon has already said she is inclined to make some “appropriate adjustments” to the timing of the trial, which is scheduled to begin, at least for now, on May 20 in federal district court in Fort Pierce, Florida. Several decisions Judge Cannon has made in recent months about the pace of the trial have made it nearly impossible for the trial to begin as planned.
It remains to be seen how long Judge Cannon will ultimately impose a delay.
On Thursday evening, 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 lawyers maintained their long-held position of wanting the trial to take place before Election Day and called for a July 8 date. But after months of trying to postpone the trial until next year, Mr Trump’s lawyers suddenly changed their mind and suggested August 12 as the date.
The hearing before Judge Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by Mr. Trump at the end of his term, comes just days after a Supreme Court decision that raises the possibility that the former president may not be tried before Election Day his other federal case — the one in which he is accused of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.
The justices agreed to decide whether Mr. Trump is immune from prosecution on election interference allegations. They have scheduled the hearings for the end of April and have frozen proceedings before the court until the matter is resolved. In practice, the Supreme Court’s decision to take up the case meant that the electoral process was unlikely to begin until September, in the middle of the general election campaign.
Judge Cannon’s decision on whether to choose a date in July, August or slightly later in the documents case could also affect the timing of the election process. Mr Trump is expected to attend the hearing on Friday.
It was not clear why Mr. Trump’s legal team said it would open until August, after long attempts to delay the trial until next year. One possibility, however, was that by proposing to spend much of the late summer and early fall in court on the secret documents case, lawyers wanted to reduce the likelihood that the election case could be heard before Election Day.
Just months ago, it looked as if Mr. Trump would spend much of 2024 in front of a jury, fending off four separate criminal indictments in four different cities.
At this point, however, only one of his criminal cases has a set start date. Last month, a Manhattan state judge chose March 25 to begin his trial on charges of arranging hush-money payments to a porn star to avert a scandal on the eve of the 2016 election.
The fourth criminal case against Mr. Trump, in which he is accused of manipulating the election results in Georgia, has not yet been heard. There is currently turmoil as a Fulton County judge is considering whether to release Fani T. Willis, the district attorney who filed the indictment, over allegations of financial misconduct related to a romantic relationship she had with one of her deputies procedure should be excluded.
Judge Aileen Cannon could delay the trial until after the election.Credit…Southern District of Florida
The hearing in Florida, which is scheduled to last most of Friday, is about more than just scheduling issues.
Judge Cannon has asked the defense and prosecution to be prepared to discuss Mr. Trump’s unusually broad and highly politicized request for further investigation, filed in January. In the filing, the former president’s lawyers indicated that as part of their defense they planned to argue in court that federal officials – including primarily the intelligence community – were “politically motivated and biased” against Mr. Trump.
The parties will also discuss Mr. Smith’s efforts to keep secret the names of about two dozen potential witnesses who could testify in court.
Judge Cannon briefly agreed to a request from Mr. Trump’s lawyers to include the witnesses’ names in a public court filing. But she put that decision on hold after Mr Smith accused her of making a “clear mistake” and said the witnesses could face threats or harassment if their identities were revealed.
Even in the discussion of these other issues, the question of the timing of the trial was arguably paramount.
If Judge Cannon were to postpone the trial until next year, she would likely face a tidal wave of criticism. It is possible it could also provoke Mr. Smith’s first appeal since the indictment was returned in June, although decisions on scheduling matters typically cannot be appealed to higher courts.
When Judge Cannon was randomly assigned to the case last spring, she was already under fire for making a decision early in the investigation that was favorable to Mr. Trump but so legally questionable that an appeals court severely reprimanding her for undoing it.
After the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and Florida residence, for classified documents in August 2022, Judge Cannon appointed an independent arbitrator to determine whether the materials collected by the agents were confidential and will be kept confidential should be kept away from investigators.
But it accompanied that relatively typical decision with another one that was all but unheard of, effectively freezing the government’s investigation into Mr. Trump until the arbitrator, known as the special master, had completed his work.
Prosecutors were outraged by the move, accusing Judge Cannon of not only not having the power to become so involved in the case, but also of treating Mr. Trump differently than a normal defendant.
A federal appeals court in Atlanta ultimately agreed, unanimously overturning her decision and pointing out that she appeared to have granted “a special exemption” for Mr. Trump, thereby “violating our nation’s founding principle that our law applies to everyone.”
Still, Judge Cannon has shown in some of her recent rulings that she is willing to defy Mr. Trump.
On Wednesday, for example, she rejected a highly unusual request from his lawyers to gain access to a secret government file detailing a series of secret discovery evidence that prosecutors said was neither helpful nor relevant to his defense.
Had Judge Cannon granted the request, legal experts say it would have gone well beyond normal procedures under the Classified Procedures Act, the federal law that governs the use of classified information in public court proceedings.
But even in ruling against Mr. Trump, Judge Cannon seemed to suggest that he differed from most of the defendants. She did not entirely agree with Mr Smith’s position that the facts in this case “do not remotely justify a departure from normal process”.
“The court,” she wrote, “cannot speak with such confidence in this first criminal prosecution of a former U.S. president — once the nation’s top secret agency for many of the documents the special counsel now seeks to withhold from him.”
Source link
2024-03-01 10:02:45
www.nytimes.com
