The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s federal classified-documents case has been accused of failing to enforce a routine deadline, amid claims the former president is hoping to delay the trial until after November’s presidential election.
Judge Aileen Cannon, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, has rejected Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request to force the former president to reveal if he plans on using a defense that he was merely relying on advice of his lawyers during the trial. Newsweek contacted the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Saturday for comment via email.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 40 charges relating to allegations he illegally retained top-secret and classified material after he left office in January 2021, then obstructed the federal attempt to retrieve them from his Mar-a-Lago, Florida, home. The former president has denied any wrongdoing and has repeatedly said that the charges are part of a political witch hunt that seeks to derail him as frontrunner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.
Cannon has previously faced calls to recuse herself from the case in which she was randomly selected to oversee because she has already made a number of decisions that could be seen to have benefited the Republican.
Southern District of Florida
In a court filings on Friday, Cannon rejected federal prosecutors “motion to compel disclosure regarding advice-of-counsel defense,” while saying such a request is “not amenable to proper consideration at this juncture.”
As noted on X, formerly Twitter, by Katie Phang, a lawyer and MSNBC legal analyst, Cannon “basically says that it’s too early in the litigation to consider forcing Donald Trump to have to disclose this information.”
Joyce Vance, a former federal prosecutor, was one of those who said that Cannon’s decision is helping Trump delay the start of the classified documents trial, which is currently scheduled for May 20.
The proceedings in Florida may yet change when a scheduling conference for the case takes place on March 1, just days before Trump’s federal trial over 2020 election obstruction and conspiracy allegations is scheduled to begin.
Trump has long been accused of trying to delay the start of both the federal classified documents and election trials. If he wins the 2024 election, he could call on the DOJ to drop the federal investigations into him once he enters office in January 2025, or pardon himself as president if he is convicted beforehand.
Because the case involves highly sensitive documents, some of them involving national security, however, Judge Cannon has had to put elaborate security protocols in place that have delayed the trial by months.
“In the Mar-a-Lago case, Judge Cannon has just refused to enforce a routine deadline & it’s entirely clear she has no intention of letting this case go to trial before the election or possibly ever,” Vance posted on X.
Others also criticized Cannon for not helping Trump’s case move forward towards its scheduled deadline.
“His luck in drawing Cannon for this open-and-shut case cannot be overstated,” posted the Scary Lawyer Guy social-media account. “While [Judge Tanya] Chutkan *may* be able to get his other trial in before November, a more experienced (+ less biased) judge would have had the MAL [Mar-aLago] case on the calendar months ago. Instead, she’s slow walking things.”
Cannon has already faced calls to remove herself from the case over claims she may be biased towards the former president.
The judge previously handed down a decision that meant that Trump would not have to testify under oath his unsubstantiated claim that the FBI may have “planted” evidence against him during the August raid at his Mar-a-Lago resort in 2022.
Another ruling from Cannon also meant that Trump would not have to state which of the materials recovered from his Florida resort had allegedly been declassified before he left the White House in January 2021. This is another disputed claim by the former president that has never been backed up by his lawyers in official court filings.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.