Judge Cannon indefinitely postpones Trump’s classified docs trial

The judge presiding over Donald Trump’s criminal case in Florida — on charges that he hoarded classified secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate after his presidency — has indefinitely postponed the trial, once scheduled for May 20.

The date had been widely expected to move amid a tangle of pretrial conflicts between special counsel Jack Smith and Trump’s attorneys. Smith had urged Judge Aileen Cannon to reschedule the trial to begin on July 8, but an order from the judge on Tuesday afternoon suggested that she is unlikely to even decide on a new trial date before late July.

Cannon, a Trump appointee who took the bench in late 2020, indicated in the order that, before setting a new trial date, she intends to resolve the backlog of other issues in the case that have piled up on her plate. Smith’s defenders have criticized Cannon for what they see as a plodding pace in resolving pretrial matters, and tensions between the special counsel and the judge have flared in recent months over a series of puzzling rulings that threatened to derail the case.

“[F]inalization of a trial date at this juncture — before resolution of the myriad and interconnected pre-trial and [classified evidence] issues … would be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions,” Cannon wrote in the five-page order.

That reshuffling further clouds the picture for Smith, who is also awaiting a Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity that could determine whether his other case against Trump — charges in Washington D.C. for attempting to subvert the 2020 election — can move forward this year.

Trump is currently on trial in a third criminal case in Manhattan, in which he is accused of falsifying records of a hush money payment to a porn star. He is also facing criminal charges in Georgia for attempting to interfere with the 2020 results in that state.

Trump has sought to delay all of his criminal cases until after this year’s election. If he wins, he could shut down the two federal cases brought by Smith, and the state cases in New York and Georgia also might have to be frozen.

Cannon’s order does not completely close the door on scheduling the classified documents case for trial in 2024, though it further diminishes that possibility, which had already appeared slim due to the slow progress of the case in recent months.

By delaying a final decision, Cannon gives other judges presiding over Trump criminal cases — U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington and Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee in Georgia — a window to schedule their own trials this summer or fall. It’s unclear, though, if either of those judges can prepare their cases in time.

The federal election case overseen by Chutkan is on hold while the Supreme Court considers whether to deem Trump immune from the charges altogether, a ruling that would gut Smith’s case. McAfee has given no indication of his timeline, though Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has pressed for an August start date.

Still, Cannon’s decision raises the likelihood that Trump will never face trial on either of the cases brought by the special counsel. If both end up punted into 2025, a Trump victory in the 2024 election would effectively end the prosecutions because he could order the Justice Department to drop the charges or even try to pardon himself.

Cannon has confounded legal experts with the pace of her decision making and long bouts of silence about crucial trial questions. Though she held a hearing March 1 on how much to postpone the original May 20 trial date, she waited more than two months before issuing any order on that issue — and still did not set a new date. In the meantime, she amassed an extensive list of pretrial disputes — many of which center on the dozens of classified documents that prosecutors may want to introduce at trial.

Cannon’s new order sets a timeline to resolve those matters by late July.