Judge’s Pace Could Push Trump Docs Trial Past Nov.

(Dreamstime)

The “slow pace” of the Florida judge who is set to preside over former President Donald Trump’s classified documents federal trial will likely push the proceedings into late summer, if not well past November’s election, according to reports.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has yet to set a trial date despite getting proposed dates last month from Trump’s legal team and special counsel Jack Smith. Trump proposed an August trial, while Smith wanted a July start. That delay has allowed Trump’s legal team to put off filing pre-trial motions that have successfully pushed back the start of his other criminal trials.

“This does seem to be moving more slowly and less sequentially than other cases that I have seen,” former Justice Department national security prosecutor David Aaron told the Associated Press.

Further, Cannon hasn’t ruled on all of Trump’s motions to dismiss, Trump’s push for the disclosure of government witnesses, and his claim that he had a right to have those documents, the Presidential Records Act, the AP reported.

One attorney said Cannon might be “gun-shy” after her appointment of an independent arbiter to sift through the seized documents at Mar-a-Lago in response to a Trump lawsuit last year. A federal appeals court unanimously ruled that Cannon overstepped her bounds.

“My sense of it is, when she did get reversed by the 11th Circuit that made her gun-shy, so she’s gone at a very slow pace” and issued “very few public, written decisions about important issues,” John Fishwick Jr., a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, told AP.

Because Trump was indicted for violating the Espionage Act, the case is proceeding under the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA). The case is at the point where Trump’s team needs to identify which documents it wants to use at trial, which would take several weeks to compose, and several weeks after that, if Trump’s petition is too vague, The Guardian reported.

Smith’s team was pushing for a deadline of March 18 deadline for Trump to file that notice, Section 5 of CIPA.

Cannon first set a trial date of May 20.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to the 40-count indictment of illegally taking sensitive government documents with him when he left the White House in 2021.