Donald Trump’s criminal trial for retaining national security documents at his Mar-a-Lago property and obstructing the justice department’s efforts to retrieve them will take place in May 2024 at the courthouse in Fort Pierce, Florida, the federal judge overseeing the case ruled on Friday.
The trial date set by the US district court judge Aileen Cannon, which largely tracked her views at a contentious hearing this week, essentially took a middle position between prosecutors’ request for a trial this year and Trump’s suggestion to delay proceedings until after next year’s election.
Trump was charged last month with retaining national defense information, including US nuclear secrets and plans for US retaliation in the event of an attack, which means his case will be tried under the time-consuming steps laid out in the Classified Information Procedures Act, or Cipa.
The order from Cannon laid out a calendar for hearings under the various sections of Cipa, with deadlines for pre-trial motions and hearings stretching through the remainder of the year and into 2024. Though, extended litigation from Trump or prosecutors could delay proceedings further.
Timings in this case are significant because of the consequences of an extended delay. If the case is not adjudicated until after the 2024 election and Trump is re-elected, he could try to pardon himself or direct the attorney general to have the justice department drop the case.
The trial date of 20 May 2024 means it will come after most of the Republican primaries and his criminal trial in New York, but only two months before the Republican national convention in July, where Trump is the frontrunner to clinch the nomination.
It remains unclear whether Cannon’s trial date will hold. Notably, Cannon appears to have taken prosecutors’ own estimate that they would only need roughly two weeks to decide Cipa Section 6(c), where the judge will decide what redactions for classified information are appropriate.
The justice department can propose to Cannon, for instance, that Trump should only get to present redacted versions of the classified documents so that they can protect some of the sensitive information from public disclosure.
But Cannon is not required to accept the request for redactions, in which case prosecutors could appeal her decisions to the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit – a move that would take far longer than the two weeks allotted and substantially push back the current trial date.
The scheduling order was the first major decision in the classified documents prosecution for Cannon, who is under heightened scrutiny for issuing favorable rulings to the former president during the criminal investigation, before they were overturned on appeal.
In her seven-page order, Cannon gave neither side exactly what they wanted, rejecting Trump’s request to indefinitely postpone setting a trial date after finding that some case management was necessary and rejecting the government’s idea for a December trial as “atypically accelerated”.
The case was complex and would probably involve multiple pre-trial motions by the defense to exclude evidence and even challenge the basis for the special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the case, to charge the former president, Cannon wrote.
“Even accepting the government’s contested submission that nothing in this case presents a ‘novel question of fact or law’, the fact remains that the court will be faced with extensive pre-trial motion practice on a diverse number of legal and factual issues,” Cannon wrote.
Cannon also ruled that the voluminous discovery warranted a slower schedule, saying it included more than a million pages of unclassified material, at least nine months of surveillance footage, more than 1,500 pages of classified documents, as well as additional material from seized devices.
