US President Donald J. Trump looks on as he makes an announcement on healthcare in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., US, September 18, 2026.
President Donald Trump's administration is asking a judge who frequently rules in their favor, and has been accused of bias, to delay a case involving the disclosure of potentially embarrassing documents until after the midterm elections.
"JUST IN: Trump trying to re-delay argument in repeatedly delayed 11th Circuit appeal on release of Jack Smith's Mar-a-Lago docs report," reported Politico's Josh Gerstein on Monday. "Lawyers for Trump's ex-co-defendants say they have scheduling conflicts with Nov. 2, urge Jan. 2027."
In their filing, the Trump administration asked that "Wherefore, Defendants-Appellees hereby respectfully request that this Court continue the oral argument presently scheduled for November 2, 2026, and reset oral argument for a date convenient to the Court and counsel in or after January 2027, as previously scheduled."
Because the case was sent to Cannon, it is quite likely that Trump will get what he wants. In 2022, when presiding over the case involving Trump misappropriating classified documents and moving them to Mar-a-Lago, Cannon halted the Justice Department's review of the documents and appointed a special master as Trump requested. A higher court overturned Cannon's decision, saying she has overstepped her authority. Two years later Cannon dismissed the government's case by arguing that Smith's appointment violated the Constitution, a decision that ignored decades of precedent and was made seemingly out of whole cloth. Then this year, Cannon ruled that the Justice Department could never publicly discuss the details of the Smith prosecution against Trump.
That last decision put officials in a bind, as they later wrote that "the government recently requested—and now, in some cases, subpoenaed—specific clients to provide non-public information about the classified documents case to individuals outside of the Department of Justice ('DOJ')" in a filing.
They added, "Specifically, clients seek to confirm that they can freely discuss non-public information related to their work on the investigation with individuals outside of the DOJ, including but not limited to a federal grand jury and clients' own counsel, without running afoul of the terms of the order."
More recently, the Trump administration's fixation on Smith led to a different kind of embarrassment for them. When Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) attempted to catch Smith committing perjury by claiming Smith lied about being in Atlanta, on the grounds that they could prove Smith had attended an Atlanta Hawks game, it quickly came out that Smith had actually been at a University of Iowa Hawkeyes game held in Smith's home state of Maryland.
Neither Schmitt nor the Trump Justice Department which furnished him with the documents have apologized, even though it later came out Schmitt never the information had not been vetted.
