Judge Aileen Cannon has scheduled a pivotal hearing Friday in the classified documents case.
People show their support for former President Donald Trump as he visits the Alto Lee Adams Sr. U.S. Courthouse on Feb. 12 in Fort Pierce, Florida. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images
FORT PIERCE, Florida — Donald Trump has already succeeded this week in delaying one of his two federal criminal trials. On Friday, a federal judge in Florida will begin deciding just how far to delay his other one.
Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing Trump’s classified documents case, has scheduled a marathon hearing with a daunting agenda. Among the issues likely to be discussed: how jurors will be selected, how classified evidence should be handled, whether the names of sensitive government witnesses should be publicly revealed and whether the trial should be postponed until this summer — or until after the presidential election.
On Thursday evening, Trump’s lawyers and special counsel Jack Smith filed competing proposals for the trial schedule. Officially, the case is slated to go to trial on May 20, but Cannon, whom Trump appointed to the federal bench in 2020, is almost certain to push that date back. The big question is how much she’ll push it.
Even prosecutors are resigned that the case will be delayed. They’re asking for a July 8 trial date that would represent a six-week slowdown. Trump, on the other hand, is asking Cannon to consider pushing the trial until after the 2024 election or, if she refuses, to instead set it for Aug. 12.
Trump is expected to attend the Friday session in Cannon’s courtroom in Fort Pierce, about an hour’s drive north of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, where he is accused of stashing reams of government secrets and obstructing efforts by federal authorities to retrieve them.
He will likely look on from the defense table as his lawyers and prosecutors jockey over the potentially decisive issue of timing, as well as a slew of other legal questions.
Cannon, for instance, may grapple with a long list of complex questions about how to handle classified evidence at the heart of Smith’s case against Trump. Many of those thorny issues were argued by lawyers in closed-door hearings at the same courthouse earlier this week.
And Cannon has signaled that Friday’s session will address another fraught question: whether Trump should be allowed to publicly file court papers containing material that the government argues is sensitive and should remain sealed. That material, which the government turned over to Trump in discovery, contains the names of government witnesses and FBI agents.
Cannon initially ruled that the material should be made public, prompting an outcry from Smith’s team, which says such publicity could endanger the witnesses, particularly in light of Trump’s propensity to attack his critics and perceived opponents on social media.
The judge may also consider a proposed questionnaire for prospective jurors, one of the most critical tasks in a case that has garnered extraordinary media attention and involves one of the most polarizing figures in America.
Smith, Trump and his codefendants proposed a questionnaire late Wednesday that featured 100 questions — many of which probed much deeper than typical jury interviews. And prosecutors diverged sharply from the defendants in several areas, including Trump and his allies’ request to ask questions about the jurors’ view of politics and politicians.
Even where the parties agreed, the questions sometimes strayed into deeply personal territory that is rarely asked of jurors. For example, they want to ask jurors to identify three people they admire most and three people they admire least. The questionnaire also asks jurors to identify, in great detail, their media consumption habits — often a proxy for their views on current events — and their social media use.
The hearing before Cannon comes two days after the Supreme Court boosted Trump’s odds of avoiding the other criminal prosecution brought by Smith: a Washington, D.C., indictment charging him with conspiring to subvert the 2020 election and to disenfranchise millions of voters. Cannon’s decisions over the next few days may determine whether he has a chance to escape both of the federal criminal cases this year.
Another factor that has the potential to upset any schedule Cannon tries to set: the possibility that Smith could file appeals that lead to further delays.
If Cannon orders that Trump or his attorneys are entitled to classified evidence not already turned over to them or if she rules that Trump is entitled to disclose more of that evidence at trial than prosecutors have agreed to, Smith could take the issue to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. That alone could result in months of delay.
And prosecutors are already threatening an appeal in the dispute about naming witnesses publicly in pretrial filings. Prosecutors told Cannon in a filing Wednesday night that they might ask the 11th Circuit to overrule her if she insists those names be made public at this time. However, the type of appeal Smith’s team said it is mulling wouldn’t automatically cause a broad halt in the case.
Source: Politico