A federal judge ordered Friday that the trial in the classified documents case that special counsel Jack Smith brought against former President Donald Trump begin in May 2024.
US District Judge Aileen Cannon said that the trial could begin as early as May 20. A pretrial hearing in the case will be held on May 14.
If that timeline holds, then the trial would fall deep in the 2024 race for the White House, coming amid multiple GOP presidential primaries. It would be a rebuke to Trump and his legal team, who wanted to postpone the trial until after the general election takes place in November 2024.
However, Cannon’s order also means that the case will unfold at a far slower speed than what Smith’s team was proposing, when it recommended a fast-paced timeline that would start the trial in mid-December of this year. Such a schedule would have a trial wrap up before primary voting gets underway in the 2024 election, where Trump is the leading GOP candidate.
The vast majority of state primaries will be finished by mid-May, although Nebraska, Maryland and West Virginia are set to hold their primary elections on May 14. Oregon votes the following week and a handful of states, including New Jersey, are now scheduled to vote on June 4. During his first presidential run, Trump effectively clinched the nomination at the end of May 2016 – before formally becoming the party’s nominee in July at the GOP convention in Cleveland.
While it’s likely the nominating process will be essentially decided by May, recent history has plenty examples of the race remaining a delegate fight until early summer.
It's within Judge Cannon's purview to delay the trial until next May, but the issue is she's personally responsible for delaying the proceedings for several months before we even got to this.
Otherwise, she literally split the difference. How Solomonic. Marcy Wheeler explains it all:
Her order is not, on its face, unreasonable. It sets a CIPA trial for 49 weeks after it was charged, which is solidly within the scope of what it normally takes to bring these cases to trial. She has made this a complex case which is similarly not unreasonable.
The most unreasonable part of her order, thus far, is that she set the trial to be held in her tiny courtroom in Fort Pierce, making it utterly unworkable for the press.
The second most unreasonable part of her order is that she has treated the classified protective order as a month-long fully briefed affair, effectively absolving Trump and his co-defendant of conferring like grown-ups, such that classified discovery might not begin until after August 25, two months of delay she is adding to this timeline on top of the three months of delay she created last year.
Finally, she deferred on the question of whether the election will make jury selection next May impossible.
Again, this is not unreasonable, at least thus far. But she is letting Trump and Walt Nauta stall by obstructing from the outset.
Cannon has learned the difference between putting a thumb on the scale of justice instead of 318 metric tons of concrete. Progress!
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