Federal judge Aileen Cannon in Florida is considering delaying Donald Trump’s trial on charges that he hoarded classified documents and obstructed the government’s attempts to retrieve them. The trial is scheduled to begin on May 20, but Trump wants it postponed until after the 2024 election. If he wins, he could shut down the casel “I’m just having a hard time seeing how realistically this work can be accomplished in this compressed period of time, given the realities that we’re facing,” Cannon said at a hearing on Wednesday, Politico reports..Cannon sounded highly skeptical of claims by prosecutors that the case could be kept more or less on pace with the schedule she set in July.
She said aspects of that schedule are now impractical due to difficulties already encountered with sensitive documents related to the case. Cannon, whom Trump appointed in 2020, said she would make “reasonable adjustments” to the schedule — such as deadlines for pretrial filings — but did not say she planned to delay the trial date, which prosecutors urged her to leave unchanged. Any delay in the pretrial proceedings could create a ripple effect that postpones the trial itself. Trump faces a gauntlet of criminal and civil trials during the first half of 2024 as he simultaneously seeks the Republican presidential nomination. Two of the criminal cases were brought by special counsel Jack Smith: the classified documents case in Florida and a case on election subversion in Washington, D.C.
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