It’s time for the lapdog known as Aileen Cannon to be removed and paradoxically, that may be just what she’s aiming for. Special counsel Jack Smith had no objection to a short delay in a CIPA (Classified Information Procedures Act) filing but upending the entire trial calendar was not what he had in mind. And again, with all the heat that Cannon has brought her own way, it’s conceivable that she may want out of hearing this case and this may be the straw that breaks Jack Smith’s patience, if not his back.
New: Trump gets a new delay on the classified docs docket — Judge Cannon has granted a temporary stay for Trump’s next CIPA filing deadline while she weighs whether to push back the entire pre-trial schedule. pic.twitter.com/9nnPtpXTnS
— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) October 6, 2023
Special counsel prosecutors accused Donald Trump of trying to delay the classified documents case to within three months of the 2024 election in a court filing late on Wednesday, suggesting his lawyers had attempted to weaponize the complex government secrecy rules to upend the trial.
The alleged delay effort from Trump – whose overarching legal strategy is to push back his criminal cases, potentially until after the election because he could have them dropped were he to win – centers on a proposal from his legal team to extend pre-trial deadlines.
The justice department said in their filing that it was prepared to accept a short extension in the case after the presiding US district judge, Aileen Cannon, allowed Trump to ask for more time to prepare his next legal briefs following earlier delays in the pre-trial process.
But prosecutors sharply objected to a proposal from Trump to delay not just one deadline but the entire pre-trial schedule, saying it amounted to a veiled attempt to re-litigate the trial date set for May 2024.
The judge has to rule on proposed redactions or substitutions before classified documents can be turned over to the prosecutors, and so why not use that fact to delay the entire process. At least that’s how it’s playing out so far, is as a weaponization of the rules, rather than simply following them.
At its core, prosecutors objected to Trump lawyers’ claim they could not start Cipa section 4 before they had reviewed all of the discovery, and their attempt to create a new Cipa section 4 process that involved sequential court filings from both sides instead of doing it simultaneously.
“The defendants provide no examples of where a Court has handled Section 4 briefing on a responsive briefing schedule as defendants propose – and the Government is aware of none,” the filing said of the proposal.
Prosecutors argued that Trump only had a number of potential defenses to the charge that he retained national defense information, and his lawyers did not need to go through all of the discovery to come up with their broad defense arguments for the purpose of filing a section 4 brief.
The defenses would come down to a handful of options, prosecutors argued: Trump was authorized to posses those documents, the documents did not contain national security information, the documents were not “closely held”, or that Trump did not wilfully retain them.
“The nature of the material the Government will propose substituting and the limited redactions it will propose are unlikely to require finely detailed defense theories in order for the Court to determine the helpfulness of the material or the adequacy of a substitution,” the filing said.
Prosecutors added that even if Trump did need to review more discovery than usual, most of the unclassified discovery had already been produced, including more than 200 witness interview transcripts as well as all of the surveillance footage at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club.
The production of the classified discovery was also almost complete, the prosecutors said, and the only materials not turned over were five classified documents that were so highly sensitive that they could not be stored with the rest of the materials in a secure facility in Florida.
This story, breaking right after the news of Trump bragging to an Australian billionaire about nuclear secrets shows how utterly out of his depth Trump was as president. Not that this is new information, but certainly this underscores our worst fears.
Frankly, I’ve been stunned since news of the submarine information Trump blabbed about broke. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to write about it. It’s complicated but I do have some insight into how highly protected all that is and how devastating it is that Trump was so casual about sharing it.