In his classified documents and obstruction case, Donald Trump previously tried to push off trial through the 2024 election. And despite U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon instead setting the trial for May, the former president’s team has now essentially reupped the delay request to “until at least mid-November 2024.”
That’s an interesting spot on the calendar, because it happens to coincide with the presidential election that could thwart the case if Trump is elected again. Of his four criminal prosecutions, this Florida case and the Washington, D.C., election interference case are federal ones that a president could foil via pardon or otherwise, while that’s not so with his election case in Georgia or his hush money prosecution in New York. (And don’t confuse the last one with Trump’s ongoing New York civil fraud trial.)
That’s an interesting spot on the calendar, because it happens to coincide with the presidential election that could thwart the case if Trump is elected again.
So what’s special about “at least mid-November 2024”? Trump’s lawyers don’t exactly spell it out in their latest filing to Cannon, a Trump appointee who seems to be slow-walking the Florida case generally. They claim that difficulties in getting and reviewing discovery evidence, combined with their client’s already heavy caseload, require that delay. Still, how it necessitates pushing the May trial to mid-November or beyond is unclear.
To be sure, whatever Cannon does wouldn’t upend the D.C. case, which has the earliest of the criminal trial dates, in March — though Trump is also effectively trying to delay that one, by seeking to push back deadlines. But while trial dates can always move for a variety of reasons, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington seems unlikely to go for such delay, and Trump isn’t doing himself any favors with dangerous behavior that could lead the judge to start the trial even sooner. Chutkan is considering whether to impose a gag order on the GOP’s leading presidential candidate (which the judge in Trump’s New York civil case just did).
Remember, when Cannon set the May date, it was reasonable enough. But as I wrote at the time, “we’ll see if the late May start date holds, as Trump will inevitably try to delay it as he moves closer to potentially recapturing the White House.” Now we have reason to ask that question anew and, once again, we await Cannon’s answer.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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