Federal prosecutors on Thursday asked the judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case to reject a motion by Mr Trump’s lawyers to postpone his trial indefinitely, a move that could serve to postpone the procedure until after the 2024 elections.
The filing by prosecutors came three days after Mr. Trump’s legal team made an unusual request to Judge Aileen M. Cannon asking that the administration’s initial suggestion that the trial be held in December be overturned. and delaying it until all “substantial motions” had been tabled. ‘ in the case were presented and resolved.
The timing of a trial is crucial in all criminal cases. But it is especially important in this case, in which Mr. Trump has been charged with illegally holding 31 classified documents after leaving the White House and conspiring with one of his personal aides, Walt Nauta, to suppress the administration’s attempts to prevent recovery. .
Mr. Trump is now both a federal criminal defendant and the leading Republican Party nominee in the presidential campaign. There could be untold complications if his trial seeps into the final stages of the race. Furthermore, if the trial is postponed until after the election and Mr. Trump wins, he could try to pardon himself after taking office or have his attorney general dismiss the case entirely.
Prosecutors working for Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, apparently recognizing this high stakes, told Judge Cannon not to allow Mr. Trump and Mr. Nauta to drag the case on without a foreseeable end.
“There is no legal or factual basis for proceeding in such an undetermined and open manner,” they wrote, “and the defendants provide none.”
Trump’s attorneys based their request for a stay — filed Monday in Florida’s Southern District — on several allegations.
They said as the case progressed, they planned to use new — and presumably time-consuming — arguments that the Presidential Records Act allowed Mr. Trump to take documents from the White House. That interpretation of the law from the Watergate era is at odds with how legal experts interpret it.
Prosecutors responded by saying this potential defense “borders on frivolous.” They also reminded Judge Cannon that it wasn’t new at all, but was in fact at the center of an extensive legal battle she presided over last year in which an outside arbitrator was appointed to review a wealth of material submitted by the Supreme Court in March. FBI seized. -a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.
Trump’s lawyers also complained that an initial trove of discovery evidence provided by the government was voluminous — including more than 800,000 pages of material — and would take a long time to sift through.
Prosecutors fired back, saying about a third of those pages contained unimportant “email header and footer information” and that a series of “key” documents that would lead the defense to the crucial parts of the discovery only amounted to about 4,500 pages.
Prosecutors also told Judge Cannon they planned to provide Mr Trump’s lawyers with a second set of unclassified evidence as early as next week, including interviews with witnesses on June 23 — a few weeks after Mr Trump was indicted. That suggests, as DailyExpertNews has reported, that the investigation of the classified documents case continued even after charges were filed.
As for the classified discovery evidence, prosecutors said they plan to move most of the classified material seized at Mar-a-Lago next week to a sensitive compartmentalised information facility at Miami’s federal courthouse for review by attorneys. from Mr Trump – although some of them only have interim security clearances.
Once the lawyers have their final security clearances, prosecutors said, they will be able to review the remaining classified documents, including some “relating to the release of various materials during the Trump administration.”
In asking for an extension, Mr Trump’s lawyers had said his campaign schedule “requires an enormous amount of time and energy” and that these efforts would continue until the election. They argued that Mr Nauta had a similar problem, as his job requires him to accompany Mr Trump on “most campaign trips around the country”.
But prosecutors appeared to have no patience for this argument, saying the two men’s “professional schedules provide no basis for delay.”
“Many indicted defendants have demanding jobs that require a significant amount of time and energy, or a significant amount of travel,” they wrote. “The Speedy Trial Act contemplates no such thing as a basis for continuation, and the court should not admit it here.”