The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s classified documents case has reversed her own decision and elected to postpone the deadline for a crucial court filing in the criminal proceeding. This decision, revealed Monday, increases the risk that the trial will be pushed back past the November election.
Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s postponement of the filing deadline — a list of the classified documents that the defense team would like to present at trial — is another feather in Trump’s cap, marking his latest successful attempt at delaying the classified documents trial. If he wins, Trump can then order his Justice department to drop the matter entirely, The New York Times reported.
Trump's lawyers were supposed to file their list by this Thursday, a deadline Cannon had set last month. The judge did not announce a new deadline, nor has she announced a trial start date. The trial had been slated to start May 20, but that date was scrapped at a March 1 hearing.
When the list of defense documents is filed, it will be an integral part of the criminal trial, with lawyers for both sides arguing over what jurors would be allowed to hear at trial. This is “a contested process, balancing issues of public access and national security, that could take months to complete,” according to the Times.
The first time Trump’s team asked for a delay of the Thursday deadline was about a month ago, when they sought to have it pushed to June. At the time, they argued that they were too busy defending the former president in one of the other four criminal cases against him: the Manhattan hush money trial.
But on Monday the defense pointed to a different reason, arguing that special counsel Jack Smith’s office hadn’t properly secured the classified files that they seized them from Trump’s private club and residence in Mar-a-Lago and that they needed more time to assess that revelation. Smith in a filing last week had noted that some of the files were not in their original order, possibly due to an earlier review by a so-called special master that had been sought by the defense.
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