The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s criminal case in South Florida said Tuesday she doesn’t think the 2024 election will be a deciding factor for her in determining when the ex-president's historic trial begins.
U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon made the comment during a nearly two-hour public hearing on the 37-count criminal indictment that Special Counsel Jack Smith secured in June against Trump and his personal valet and co-defendant, Walt Nauta.
Among Cannon's top early priorities is establishing a schedule for the legal proceedings, and Tuesday's hearing marked the first time she's brought together federal prosecutors and defense attorneys for Trump and Nauta to discuss the matter.
Smith's team has been pressing for a mid-December beginning to the Trump trial, while lawyers for Trump and Nauta want the entire proceeding postponed until after the 2024 election that the former president is running in with the hope of winning back his old White House job.
During Tuesday's hearing, Smith's team appeared to concede their December proposal was aspirational.
"We feel it is very important that we have a trial date to work from, realizing that the trial date may not be set in stone," said Jay Bratt, the Chief of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section of the Justice Department's National Security Division.
Such a schedule may depend on whether the cases against Trump and Nauta are labeled complex, a designation that the government has opposed. Cannon appeared inclined to find that it was, pressing prosecutors on whether any similar Espionage Act case had such an ambitious schedule. Bratt appeared to concede that he couldn't find one, though he added that Trump's case was different from the fold in an important aspect. The evidence has been available for nearly a year, since the FBI searched and seized the documents at issue in the case in August 2022.
Pressing both the government and the defense, Cannon similarly showed little interest in basing her ultimate decision on waiting until the November 2024 election has passed.
"I can appreciate that more time is necessary, but we need to set a schedule," Cannon told Trump's attorney, Todd Blanche, early in the afternoon session.
Cannon, a Trump appointee, did not issue a decision on a trial date during Tuesday's hearing. Instead, she said she'd be weighing a number of other factors in determining a schedule, including the volume of discovery materials Smith team will be handing over to Trump's defense so it can prepare for the trial.
Court watchers have viewed the trial schedule as a key test for Cannon, whose rulings in favor of the 45th president of the United States received a blistering rebuke late last year.
After the FBI seized the documents from Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, Cannon issued an injunction blocking the government from using them in their investigation. A three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit overturned that order in a blistering rebuke that accused Cannon of undertaking a “radical” restructuring of criminal procedure on behalf of the ex-president.
In the shadow of that decision, Cannon shot down attempts by Trump's team to weigh the case's political backdrop into her consideration, or for prosecutors to respond to insinuations of political persecution by the former president's legal team. Trump's attorney Christopher Kise previously hinted, but had not outright stated, that they wanted to postpone a trial until after the 2024 election.
At one point, Cannon pressed Kise to go on-the-record about that desire.
"Your position is there can be no trial until after the election?" the judge asked.
After Kise answered in the affirmative, Cannon told him that the volume of discovery and anticipated motions would provide a more "suitable" framework for her under the Speedy Trial Act. Trump's attorneys previously accused the government of seeking an "expedited" criminal trial, but special counsel attorney David Harbach said that this formulation gets it backwards.
"It's not a speedy trial that has to be justified," Harbach noted. "It's deviation from a speedy trial that has to be justified."
Despite the unprecedented Justice Department prosecution of a former president, Harbach argued that Trump was no different from any other "busy, important person" who's been indicted.
Judge Cannon was all but begging Trump's lawyers to give her a discovery excuse, that the volume of documents would be too much for Trump's team to handle before at least this time next year or something perverse like that.
I don't know exactly how she's going to delay this case until after the election, but it looks like she's going to try.
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