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The federal judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case handed him a brief victory against special counsel Jack Smith and his team.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon agreed on Friday to temporarily halt all litigation in the case in an electronic filing.
“Cannon issued a ruling Friday temporarily delaying a previously set schedule of deadlines stretching from October through May for the Justice Department to make classified documents available to Trump’s lawyers and for the defense team to have time to review them,” Yahoo! News reported, citing The Messenger.
“The indefinite delay comes after Trump lawyers on Wednesday requested that Cannon push back the start date for the trial until after the 2024 presidential election,” Yahoo! News added. “Cannon has yet to rule on Trump’s motion to move back the trial, but her order on Friday would appear to make it less likely that the trial would begin on the scheduled date of May 20, 2024.”
That’s significant because critics of the former president have said if his legal team manages to push the trial date beyond the 2024 election and he wins, he will no doubt move to pardon himself.
Smith is not happy with a delay in his classified documents case.
The prosecutor said in a motion that Trump’s request “threatens to upend the entire schedule…and that amounts to a motion to postpone the trial until May 20, 2024.”
Smith was responding to Trump’s legal team’s claim that pre-trial hearing deadlines should be extended so that they could deal with legal issues that had arisen, such as an application for a protective order relating to Trump’s comments about witnesses and jurors.
“Instead, defendants argue for a schedule that would delay proceedings by over three months,” the motion stated.
Trump is accused of illegally storing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Smith stated that, while he was open to a brief delay, Trump was asking for too much time.
Smith said that Trump’s arguments, “overstate the complexity of anticipated pre-trial discovery litigation, and are meritless in any event. The defendants already have more than sufficient discovery to provide the Court with a description of the type of information they consider relevant and helpful. The defendants’ motion can and should be denied on this ground alone.”
Last month, Smith’s team has admitted to incorrectly stating they turned over evidence as required by law in the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump.
Prosecutors discovered that video used as evidence “had not been processed and uploaded to the platform established for the defense to view” when they were getting ready to indict Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira last week for allegedly conspiring with Trump to delete surveillance footage from the estate, Smith’s team wrote in a filing.
“The Government’s representation at the July 18 hearing that all surveillance footage the Government had obtained pre-indictment had been produced was therefore incorrect,” the prosecutors added.
“All CCTV footage obtained by the government has now been given to the defendants, according to Smith’s team. The so-called Brady rule requires prosecutors to disclose all evidence and information favorable to the defendant,” Just The News reported.
Prior to Trump’s initial court appearance in the case, he issued a scathing response to Smith’s filing of additional charges against him in his classified documents case, while also indicting a third person within Trump’s orbit in the process.
The case stems from an unprecedented FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2022.
During an interview on then-Fox News colleague Jesse Watters’ “Primetime” program, Dan Bongino went ballistic on the Biden administration and the Justice Department, which he accused of becoming highly politicized in recent years, describing the raid as “third-world bullshit.”
