U.S District Court Judge Aileen Cannon will push back the date of the trial in Jack Smith’s case against Trump over secret papers.
Amidst a slew of criminal prosecutions and civil trials, Judge Cannon has stood out as the one judge that appreciates the political timing of the cases and has made accommodations to the defendant, former President Donald Trump.
Justice reporter Julie Kelly broke the news on X.
I'll have a column explaining it all after order is filed.
— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) November 3, 2023
You will see much caterwauling by corporate media types and usual suspects like Weissmann and McQuade how Cannon is doing Trump's bidding.
But the blame lies SOLELY at the feet of DOJ. Jack Smith brought 2 unprecedented…
“As expected, Judge Cannon will delay the trial schedule in Jack Smith’s classified documents case against Trump,” Kelly wrote. “Details to follow.”
“I’ll have a column explaining it all after order is filed,” she added. “You will see much caterwauling by corporate media types and usual suspects like Weissmann and McQuade how Cannon is doing Trump’s bidding.”
“But the blame lies SOLELY at the feet of DOJ. Jack Smith brought 2 unprecedented federal cases against a former president within two months of each other. He asked for, and was granted, an expedited trial schedule in D.C. Judge Chutkan gave Trump 7 months to prepare for trial–the typical J6 case goes to trial over a year after indictment,” she continued.
“The classified docs trial represents major obstacles to defense (Trump and 2 co-defendants) as they attempt to view classified discovery in a Miami SCIF the government just set up on October 18,” she added. “All attorneys had to obtain security clearances.”
“Discovery is voluminous–1.3 million pages of unclassified, 5,500 pages of classified, and years’ worth of security footage from Trump’s properties,” she went on. “Further, Smith brought a superseding indictment in classified docs case several weeks after June indictment was handed down, adding another defendant and more charges against Trump.”
“Smith is playing games–Chutkan lets him, Cannon doesn’t,” she remarked. “Which is why she has earned the enmity of corporate media and their ‘expert’ lapdogs.”
Prosecutors on Thursday tried again to keep former President Donald Trump from seeing the evidence they were using against him, but the federal judge in charge of the case denied their efforts yet again.
Judge Aileen Cannon wrote that Biden’s special counsel at the Justice Department, Jack Smith, presented a “broad and unconvincing theory” about the Classified Information Procedures Act. Smith and his team said that this law lets them keep some documents they got from Mar-a-Lago secret for national security reasons.
Judge Cannon wasn’t convinced. In his ruling, he wrote that Smith’s deputies tried to stop defense lawyers from “almost entirely reviewing classified discovery to be produced in the case” and then put the onus on those lawyers to explain why they shouldn’t have been able to do so. It was a “atextual” and “almost blithe” reading of the CIPA law, she wrote.
Judge Cannon did, however, leave room for Smith’s team to limit access to papers for certain people. That might be harder since authorities want to present 1.3 million pages of proof.
“The court, ‘upon a sufficient showing,’ [may] authorize the United States to delete specified items of classified information from documents to be made available to the defendant through discovery,” she wrote.
Smith has charged President Trump with crimes under the Espionage Act for mishandling sensitive papers that he said revealed state secrets and information about how ready the US military is for war. President Trump has said that he is innocent and that all of the papers he has are not secret because of the Presidential Records Act.
It looks like President Trump is trying to push back the start of the trial past the 2024 elections because prosecutors have asked that the original schedule be kept.
