Donald Trump prepares to speak after winning the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary in January 2024. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Donald Trump’s Florida trial for allegedly mishandling classified documents and obstructing government efforts to retrieve them has been pushed back indefinitely, U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon ruled Tuesday, increasing the chance that the former president’s ongoing New York criminal trial may be the only one to happen before the November election.
The judge had originally set the Florida trial date for late May, but that has seemed unlikely for months, with Cannon still needing to make decisions on a number of key legal issues before a jury can hear the case.
At a scheduling hearing in Florida on March 1, Trump’s lawyers pushed to start the classified documents trial after the presidential election, in which he is the presumptive Republican nominee. Prosecutors urged Cannon to pick a date in early July.
If Trump returns to the Oval Office, he could appoint an attorney general who is willing to drop the federal charges against him. In addition, Justice Department policy forbids the criminal prosecution of a sitting president.
In her ruling Tuesday, Cannon said there are many complicated legal rules and deadlines surrounding the use of classified evidence in public criminal trials that need to be considered before she picks a new court date.
The order was a blow to special counsel Jack Smith and his team, who have argued that Trump’s team has had ample time to prepare for a summer trial and accused Trump’s lawyers of wrongly trying to use the three other criminal cases against him as a way to obfuscate and delay the legal proceedings in Florida.
Trump’s Manhattan trial for allegedly falsifying business records related to a hush money payment began in mid-April. His lead attorney in New York, Todd Blanche, is also his lead lawyer in Florida, and the legal team has told Cannon that Trump and Blanche are tied up with the ongoing trial and cannot prepare for the classified documents case.
They have also said that holding any trial too close to the election would amount to election interference and that if Cannon cannot delay the classified documents case until after November, she should schedule it for August.
Cases that involve classified documents have to follow the rules and legal proceedings required under the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA, and generally move slower than standard cases. Cannon, a Trump nominee who has been on the bench since late 2020, is relatively inexperienced and has moved slowly on key decisions, according to some legal experts, holding hearings on even long-shot motions and posing unusual legal questions.
In her order Tuesday, Cannon rescheduled a number of pretrial deadlines that parties will have to meet. The latest deadline is a CIPA-related one and a scheduling conference July 22, which means the trial cannot happen before then.
“The Court also determines that finalization of a trial date at this juncture-before resolution of the myriad and interconnected pre-trial and CIPA issues remaining and forthcoming would be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions before the Court, critical CIPA issues, and additional pretrial and trial preparations necessary to present this case to a jury,” Cannon wrote.
Trump is the first former U.S. president to be charged with crimes. He faces four separate indictments as he campaigns for another term in the White House, an unprecedented test of the nation’s legal and political systems. The timing of each case has grown increasingly consequential as he draws closer to a general election rematch against President Joe Biden.
The former president has pleaded not guilty to all 88 counts he faces. His D.C. federal trial for alleged obstruction of the 2020 election results is on hold while the Supreme Court considers his immunity claim, and his Georgia state trial for alleged election interference was stalled over accusations of prosecutorial misconduct.
In Florida, Trump is charged with dozens of counts of mishandling classified information after his presidency ended and plotting with two aides to obstruct government efforts to recover the material from Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach home and private club. Prosecutors have accused Trump of taking hundreds of classified documents with him when he left the White House. The Washington Post has previously reported that some of the material was related to nuclear secrets, Iran’s missile program and U.S. intelligence efforts in China.
On individual rulings, Cannon has so far generally sided with the government. She rejected two of Trump’s motions to dismiss the case and ruled for prosecutors on key CIPA-related decisions that could have changed the contours and direction of the legal proceedings.
But when it comes to timing, her decisions have hobbled prosecutors’ efforts to move forward quickly. They want the trial to occur before the election but have not explicitly argued that the November election is an event they are considering.
Cannon has still not ruled on a handful of Trump’s motions. On Tuesday, she scheduled multiple new hearings on his requests, including one on June 21 for Trump’s argument that Smith was unlawfully appointed and that the case against him should be dropped.
Cannon wrote in her order that her timetable is “consistent with Defendants’ right to due process and the public’s interest in the fair and efficient administration of justice.”
The next hearing on Cannon’s new schedule is on grand jury matters set for Wednesday that will not be open to the public.
As part of her order, Cannon also pushed back a key CIPA-related deadline from May 9 to June 17. Blanche had asked her to move it back until three weeks after the conclusion of Trump’s criminal trial in New York so he and Trump could spend days in a secure facility in Florida, known as a SCIF, to review the relevant classified materials.
Smith countered that Trump’s legal team has known they would need to complete these motions and could have found time to do so.
“Trump elected to engage the same counsel of record in multiple serious criminal matters, and his counsel agreed to the multiple engagements,” Smith wrote in his filing. “Having made such decisions, they should not be allowed to use their overlapping engagements to perpetually delay trial in this case.”
