Judge Aileen Cannon indefinitely postponed former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago documents case, pushing back some trial dates to late July while refusing to set a trial date.
Tuesday’s order — issued less than two weeks before Trump’s trial was still scheduled to begin on May 20 — makes it unclear when Trump’s case will be brought before a jury.
Cannon attributed the delay to the need to resolve numerous issues related to how confidential information will be handled at trial, details governed by the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA).
“The Court also determines that finalizing a trial date at this time – prior to resolution of the numerous and interconnected remaining and future pretrial and CIPA issues – would be reckless and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pretrial -pending trials. -trial motions before the Court,” Cannon wrote.
By not setting a trial date, Cannon’s decision aligns with one of the first requests from Trump’s legal team – not to set a trial date.
The last-minute postponement of the trial date comes as Cannon has failed to act on a series of motions filed with her, including numerous efforts by Trump to urge her to drop the case.
In laying out the new timeline, Cannon noted that she still has “eight substantial pretrial motions” on which she must rule.
The new list of trial deadlines postpones until July most of the litigation at CIPA, which will determine how confidential information will be presented at trial.
Cannon on Tuesday suspended another CIPA-related deadline in the case after Trump’s legal team complained about prosecutors’ handling of the documents.
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team acknowledged in court filings last week that some boxes of documents may not have been preserved in the exact order they were found, but dismissed the detail’s importance in preparing for the trial.
“The filtering team was careful to ensure that no documents were moved from one box to another, but did not focus on maintaining the sequence of documents within each box,” prosecutors wrote in a Friday filing.
They also noted that Trump’s co-defendant and manservant, Walt Nauta, “failed to raise with the government his current ‘issue’ about intra-box sequencing until more than nine months after the boxes were made available to him.”
Updated at 5:40 p.m.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
