Trump appointee Judge Cannon’s latest move amounts to an 'indefinite trial delay': expert

07 May 2024

Former President Donald Trump's federal classified documents trial is almost certainly not going to happen before the November election following the latest decision by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon.

Cannon — whom Trump appointed to her lifetime post in 2020 — recently issued a decision that she will be "temporarily staying" Trump's requirement to submit a Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) Section 5 notice, meaning the original deadline will be scuttled. Section 5 of CIPA pertains to what classified information that defendants in criminal proceedings plan to disclose in a trial ahead of time to both the government and the court. Cannon's ruling notably did not set a new deadline.

In a tweet responding to the news of Cannon's order, former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance wrote that the latest news means that the case, which "should have been ready to try by the end of last year," is now in serious jeopardy.

"Extending the 5(a) deadlines indefinitely is the same thing as giving Trump an indefinite trial delay," Vance tweeted.

Trump's lawyers have maintained that Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith's team of prosecutors unlawfully manipulated the boxes of documents after the FBI seized them from Mar-a-Lago. Smith admitted last week that some of the documents shifted while being transported and that some had been reordered as a result.

In a letter, Trump attorney Todd Blanche accused Smith of an "extraordinary breach of your constitutional and ethical obligations." But prosecutors countered that the reordering of the documents was insignificant, and that while handlers "took care to ensure that no documents were moved from one box to another," they were "not focused on maintaining the sequence of documents within each box."

Trump body man Walt Nauta, who is also indicted in the Mar-a-Lago case, has been trying to delay his Section 5 CIPA deadline as well. However, according to the Hill, the prosecution argued that his objections lodged in the pre-trial process are irrelevant, given the amount of time he's had to raise concerns.

"[Nauta] has had information about which classified documents are located in which boxes for months, and failed to raise with the Government his current ‘issue’ about intra-box sequencing until over nine months after the boxes were made available to him," prosecutors said.

Cannon initially scheduled the classified documents trial to take place on May 20. However, the ongoing issues pertaining to CIPA Section 5 alone could take months to resolve. Last month, Smith indicated he may petition the 11th Circuit to have a new judge assigned to the case given Cannon's continuous pattern of delaying and prolonging the pre-trial process.

"He is close to pushing the nuclear button," Palm Beach County state attorney David Aronberg told MSNBC. "Cannon seems to be daring Smith."

Click here to read the Hill's report in its entirety.

From Your Site Articles