Judge Eileen Cannon indefinitely postponed former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago documents lawsuit, moving some trial dates to late July but refusing to set a trial date.
Tuesday’s order came with less than two weeks left until Trump’s trial begins on May 20, but it remains unclear when Trump’s case will go to a jury.
Cannon said the delay was due to a number of issues that needed to be resolved, as detailed by the Confidential Information Procedures Act (CIPA), about how classified information would be handled in court.
“The court also believes that it would be imprudent at this point to fix a trial date before the myriad interrelated pretrial issues and future CIPA issues have been resolved, and that “We find that this is inconsistent with the court’s duty to fully and impartially consider the motion for review before the court,” Cannon wrote.
Mr. Cannon’s move not to set a trial date is consistent with one of the first requests by Mr. Trump’s defense team: not set a trial date.
The last-minute cancellation of the trial date came after Cannon failed to act on numerous motions filed against her, including numerous efforts by Trump to urge her to abandon the case.
In developing the new schedule, Cannon noted that there are still “eight substantive pretrial motions” that must be decided.
The new trial deadline postpones most CIPA cases, which determine how classified information is presented in court, until July.
Earlier Tuesday, Cannon postponed another deadline in CIPA-related cases after Trump’s legal team complained about prosecutors’ handling of documents.
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team acknowledged in a court filing last week that some of the boxes of documents may not have been stored in the order in which they were discovered, but details in preparation for the trial are unclear. denied its importance.
“Although the filter team was careful to avoid moving documents from one box to another, there was no focus on maintaining the order of documents within each box,” prosecutors said in Friday’s filing. Ta.
They also note that Trump co-defendant and acolyte Walt Nauta “failed to raise current ‘issues’ with in-box sequencing with the government until more than nine months after the boxes became available.” ” he also pointed out.
Updated at 5:40 p.m.
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