Cannon indefinitely postpones Trump’s Mar-a-Lago documents trial
Judge Aileen Cannon has indefinitely postponed former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago documents case, punting some court dates into late July while declining to set a trial date.
The Tuesday order — issued less than two weeks before Trump’s trial was still on the books to kick off on May 20 — leaves unclear when Trump’s case will ever come before a jury.
Cannon pinned the delay on the need to resolve numerous issues dealing with how classified information will be handled at trial, details governed by the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA).
“The Court also determines that finalization of a trial date at this juncture — before resolution of the myriad and interconnected pre-trial and CIPA issues remaining and forthcoming — would be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions before the Court,” Cannon wrote.
In failing to set a trial date, Cannon’s move aligns with one of the first requests by Trump’s legal team — to not set a trial date.
The last-minute scuttling of the trial date comes as Cannon has failed to act on a number of motions before her, including numerous efforts by Trump urging her to toss the case.
In laying out the new schedule, Cannon noted that she still has “eight substantive pretrial motions” she must rule on.
The new slate of trial deadlines pushes until July most of the litigation on CIPA, which will determine how classified information is presented at trial.
Cannon earlier Tuesday suspended another CIPA-related deadline in the case after Trump’s legal team complained about prosecutors’ handling of the documents.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s team acknowledged in court filings last week that some boxes of documents may not have been preserved in the exact order they were found but dismissed the significance of the detail in preparing for trial.
“The filter team took care to ensure that no documents were moved from one box to another, but it was not focused on maintaining the sequence of documents within each box,” prosecutors wrote in a Friday filing.
They also noted that Trump’s co-defendant and valet Walt Nauta “failed to raise with the Government his current ‘issue’ about intra-box sequencing until over nine months after the boxes were made available to him.”
Updated at 5:40 p.m.