The federal judge overseeing the criminal case charging Donald Trump with retaining classified documents pushed back on Friday several major deadlines for the former president to file pre-trial motions, a move that could have the consequential effect of delaying the start of the trial in Florida.
The judge put off until March making the fraught decision about whether to actually delay the trial – currently scheduled for next May – but the new timetable she laid out in a nine-page written order gave little scope for the pre-trial process to finish in time.
The order from US district judge Aileen Cannon was positive for Trump, who has made no secret that his overarching legal strategy is to delay beyond the 2024 election in the hopes that winning re-election would allow him to pardon himself or direct the justice department to drop the charges.
Trump was indicted this summer with violating the espionage act when he illegally retained classified documents after he left office and conspiring to obstruct the government’s efforts to retrieve them from his Mar-a-Lago club, including defying a grand jury subpoena.
But the fact that Trump was charged with retaining national defense information means his case will be tried under the complex rules laid out in the Classified Information Procedures Act, or Cipa, which governs how those documents can be used in court.
At issue is the fact that the seven-stage Cipa process is sequential, meaning each previous section has to be completed before the case can proceed to the next section. A delay halfway through the process invariably has the net effect of delaying the entire schedule leading to trial.
The judge’s order on the timetable pushed back a series of crucial Cipa deadlines by several months, when compared to the original timetable she had laid out that projected a trial starting in May.
According to the new timetable, prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith will not have their Cipa section 4 motion – a motion asking the judge to redact certain information from the classified documents turned over to Trump – considered until December, instead of October.
The response from Trump challenging the redactions that prosecutors will request is not due for another month, according to the new timetable, leaving the court hearing to adjudicate the competing section 4 requests to take place on 15 February 2024, instead of the original date of 17 October 2023.
Espionage law experts told the Guardian that the new timetable almost certainly leaves insufficient time to complete the Cipa process, because the final sections of Cipa, dealing with the admissibility of redacted classified documents into evidence at trial, is typically the most extensive.
The judge wrote that she would decide in March whether the current May 2024 trial date could be kept, but early indications, based on her reasoning in her order and her remarks about the schedule at a court hearing last week, suggest she remains inclined to seek a postponement.
Cannon expressed concern at the hearing that Trump’s other criminal cases scheduled for between March and May, starting in New York for hush-money payments made before the 2016 election and following in Washington for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, could “collide” with the documents case in Florida.
The prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith explicitly complained to the judge that Trump’s requests to postpone some deadlines because of complications with the discovery process under Cipa amounted to a request to delay the trial.
But the judge concluded the hearing by saying she would enter an order as soon as possible outlining “reasonable adjustments” to the timetable after repeatedly mentioning that she believed delays in turning over the classified discovery to Trump’s team would cause the cases to clash.
