A federal judge ordered Friday that the trial in the classified documents case that special counsel Jack Smith brought against former President Donald Trump begin in mid-May 2024. US District Judge Aileen Cannon scheduled jury selection to begin on May 14 at the federal courthouse in Ft. Pierce, Florida. She said a two-week trial period would then begin on May 20. The Associated Press has the story:
Judge sets May 20 for Trump’s docs case trial
Newslooks- WASHINGTON (AP)
A federal judge in Florida on Friday has set a trial date for next May for former President Donald Trump in a case charging him with illegally retaining hundreds of classified documents.
The May 20, 2024, trial date is a compromise between a request from prosecutors to set the trial for this December and a request from defense lawyers to schedule it after the 2024 presidential election. Trump’s trial on charges of mishandling classified documents will begin on May 20, 2024.
Judge Aileen Cannon laid out the schedule three days after defense lawyers argued that the case should not head to trial until after the November 2024 presidential election, due to Trump’s status as a current presidential candidate.
The ruling from Cannon, a Trump appointee, lands on a middle ground between the requests of Trump’s legal team and the Department of Justice, which had pushed for the trial to begin in late 2023.
If the date holds, it would follow close on the heels of a separate New York trial for Trump on dozens of state charges of falsifying business records in connection with an alleged hush money payment to a porn actor. It also means the trial will not start until deep into the presidential nominating calendar and probably well after the Republican nominee is clear — though before that person is officially nominated at the Republican National Convention.
In pushing back the trial from the Dec. 11 start date that the Justice Department had asked for, Cannon wrote that “the Government’s proposed schedule is atypically accelerated and inconsistent with ensuring a fair trial.” She agreed with defense lawyers that the amount of evidence that would need to be sifted through before the trial, including classified information, was “voluminous.”
“The Court finds that the interests of justice served by this continuance outweigh the best interest of the public and Defendants in a speedy trial,” Cannon wrote.
Trump could yet face additional trials in the coming year. He revealed this week that he had received a letter informing him that he was a target of a separate Justice Department investigation into efforts to undo the 2020 presidential election, and prosecutors in Georgia plan to announce charging decisions within weeks in an investigation into attempts by Trump and his allies to subvert the vote there.
