Trump-appointed judge delays classified files trial indefinitely
The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s prosecution on charges of retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club on Tuesday formally scrapped her scheduled 20 May trial date without setting a new date, ruling the case was nowhere near ready to take before a jury in Florida.
The fact that the original May trial date would not hold was a foregone conclusion and has been apparent since last year, given delays with pre-trial litigation and the number of unresolved legal issues that have only increased in recent months.
The presiding US district court judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, set several new deadlines in a five-page order scrapping the trial date, seemingly in an effort to get the case back on track, but the drawn-out nature of the dates cast doubt on the likelihood of a trial before the 2024 election. In doing so, the judge played into Trump’s overarching legal strategy to seek indefinite delays for his criminal cases, under the belief that winning re-election would enable him to appoint a loyalist as attorney general who could direct prosecutors to drop the charges.
In another win for the former president, the Georgia state court of appeals yesterday said it would consider an appeal from Trump against an order allowing Fani Willis, the district attorney, to continue prosecuting a separate election interference case in Fulton county.
In a one-page order, the appeals court said it would allow Trump to challenge the decision not to disqualify Willis over her relationship with Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor she hired to lead the Trump case.
Scott McAfee, the trial judge overseeing the case, ruled in March that Willis could stay on the case as long as Wade resigned. Wade resigned on the same day that McAfee issued his decision.
Trump now has 10 days to file a notice of appeal, the court said. The decision to hear the appeal decreases the chances that the case will go to trial before the November election and allows Trump and his lawyers to undermine Willis’s credibility.
Trump and more than a dozen of his allies were charged last year with racketeering over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump and his co-defendants tried to dismiss the case by alleging that Willis’s relationship, and statements she made at a black church in Atlanta suggesting criticism of her was racist, meant she should be recused from the case.
In Florida, the only silver lining for the special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the case, is that the federal judge overseeing Trump’s criminal case in Washington DC on charges that he conspired to overturn the 2020 election results is free to schedule that case for trial in the summer.
But the possibility of that case proceeding to trial before the election is also in doubt, since a trial date cannot be set until the US supreme court rules on Trump’s presidential immunity claim and even then, Trump has roughly three more months of defence preparation time still to use.
Trump’s success in delaying his federal criminal cases with pre-trial motions, and playing them off each other, means the New York criminal trial currently under way on charges he falsified business records may be the only case to go to trial before the 2024 election in November.
Stormy Daniels, the adult film star at the centre of the hush-money scandal, is expected to be cross-examined today in Manhattan.