Judge Cannon to preside at first pretrial hearing in Trump documents case
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The federal judge presiding over Donald Trump’s trial for allegedly mishandling classified documents is scheduled to meet with prosecutors and the former president’s attorneys for the first time Tuesday afternoon in a Fort Pierce, Fla., courtroom. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight The public hearing is expected to focus on administrative procedures required in a case that relies on classified government materials as evidence. It could also provide insight into whether U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon will push to resolve the trial before or after the 2024 presidential election.
Prosecutors and Trump’s defense attorneys have sharply differed on when the trial should take place, and in an order Monday, Cannon said the two sides should come to the next day’s hearing prepared to discuss the potential timing.
Trump is seeking another presidential term, and he remains the front-runner for the Republican nomination next year. Last month, Trump and a longtime aide, Waltine “Walt” Nauta, were charged in a 38-count indictment that accused the former president of improperly retaining 31 classified documents at his Florida residence and enlisting his aide to help him secretly keep some of the materials despite government demands they be returned.
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Both Trump and Nauta pleaded not guilty during court appearances before magistrate judges in Miami.
Cannon, a Trump appointee who was named to the bench in 2020, works in the Fort Pierce division of the South Florida federal court district. She was randomly assigned this case, but previously gained significant public attention when she intervened last year in the Justice Department’s investigation.
Her controversial ruling essentially granted Trump an independent reviewer, known as a special master, to examine all the documents seized by the FBI in an Aug. 8 search of his Florida property to see if any documents should be kept from investigators. A conservative-leaning appeals court later reversed her order, ending the special master proceedings.
The judge would likely face intense scrutiny in this case, as observers watch for clues about how she will preside and whether any of her rulings may appear to indicate she is biased in favor of Trump.
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Prosecutors in the case filed the indictment in South Florida’s West Palm Beach federal court division. Under local rules, Cannon has the authority to determine which of the five divisions within the South Florida district the trial will be held. She decided to hold the pretrial hearing in her Fort Pierce courtroom.
The trial’s timing appears to be an early friction point between Trump’s attorneys and federal prosecutors. Cannon has technically set the trial start date for August, though that early date has been considered likely to change. Attorneys for Trump have suggested that the trial be delayed until after next year’s presidential election, while prosecutors instead called for having the trial in December.
In a filing last week, Trump’s attorneys suggested holding the trial before the presidential contest is complete could impact the election’s outcome and make it hard for Trump to get a fair jury. They also argued that Trump’s side could not properly prepare for a trial by December because he will be busy with his campaign and is also facing at least two other court cases.
Trump is facing a civil trial in New York this year over fraud allegations brought against him by that state’s attorney general, along with a criminal trial in Manhattan set for March 2024 on charges accusing him of falsifying business records.
Prosecutors pushed back on the defense suggestions, writing in a filing last week that the legal issues at the crux of the case are not novel and calling the requested delay extraordinary.
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Trump and Nauta, prosecutors wrote, “claim unequivocally that they cannot receive a fair trial” before the election. But prosecutors also wrote, “There is no basis in law or fact for proceeding in such an indeterminate and open-ended fashion, and the Defendants provide none.”
They wrote that jury selection in the case “may be more time-consuming than in other cases, but those are reasons to start the process sooner rather than later.”
The classified document case in South Florida will ultimately be a jury trial, and it will be tried under the rules of the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA — a law that spells out pretrial steps that must be taken to decide what classified information will be used in court and how.
On Monday, federal prosecutors asked in court filings for Cannon to issue an order that would require Trump, Nauta and their attorneys to sign an agreement that would prohibit them from divulging the classified material in any manner before they were able to examine the evidence as part of the pretrial discovery process.
This proposed order is a typical pretrial move under CIPA, said David Aaron, a former Justice Department lawyer who prosecuted national security cases. The hearing set for Tuesday is also a typical step in CIPA cases, Aaron said. He said federal prosecutors could request at the hearing that Cannon give them permission not to hand over certain classified materials that the government has collected as part of its evidence.
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Such a request — which is detailed in Section 4 of CIPA — could require a special hearing in which Cannon would rule on the government’s request and could slow down the criminal proceedings.
Typically, prosecutors are required to hand over all of their evidence so defendants can understand the case that the government has against them. This case, however, involves classified materials.
Trump’s attorneys will be required to have a security clearance to view the evidence, and government lawyers may decide that the exposure of some materials could risk national security and may ask Cannon to allow them to keep it obscured.
“We will see if the judge sets a schedule that is consistent with what the government has been asking for — that will tell us something,” Aaron said. “And we will also be able to tell a lot from whether the judge schedules a Section 4 hearing. If there is a Section 4 hearing, that means the government will not modify the discovery obligations at all in order to keep things moving.”
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Source: The Washington Post
