U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has granted former President Donald Trump a significant victory in the case involving classified documents, which was filed by special counsel Jack Smith. Cannon approved a request from Trump’s legal team to extend the deadline to May 9. According to Newsweek, two other defendants also had their deadlines extended.
“It relates to Section 5(a) of the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA), which would disclose what sensitive materials Trump intends to use at the trial,” the outlet’s report continued.
Trump has entered a plea of not guilty to 40 federal charges linked to accusations of unlawfully retaining classified materials after his departure from the White House in January 2021, as well as impeding the federal efforts to recover them. Over the years, former President Bill Clinton, his national security adviser Sandy Berger, current President Joe Biden, who was then Vice President, and former Vice President Mike Pence have all been found to have classified materials in their possession, yet none of them faced similar charges.
In the case of Biden, former special counsel Robert Hur concluded that the former Vice President had unlawfully held classified materials but opted not to prosecute him, citing Biden’s diminished mental capacity. The trial is set to commence on May 20. Nevertheless, Cannon did not promptly set a new deadline for Trump to submit his CIPA-related documents, potentially raising the possibility that the trial might not occur before the November 2024 election, as highlighted by Newsweek.
Cannon filed court documents on Monday, effectively pausing the CIPA request concerning the classified materials and expert witnesses in the Florida trial. The reason behind the indefinite postponement of the May 9 CIPA deadline was not provided by the judge, who only mentioned the scheduling of additional pretrial deadlines and hearings. Cannon has yet to make a decision on various motions filed by Trump, Walt Nauta, and Carlos De Oliveira, which seek to dismiss charges related to classified documents. This could potentially cause further delays in the trial’s commencement.
In response to a recent submission by Smith’s prosecutors, acknowledging evidence tampering and misleading the judge regarding certain aspects of the evidence and findings from the August 2023 FBI raid at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, Cannon granted Trump’s request for a delay.
“Legal experts told Just the News the revelation could prove to be a serious problem for prosecutors and a violation of court rules to preserve evidence in the state it was seized,” the outlet reported.
As per the submission made by Smith’s team on Friday, it was revealed that the sequence of documents within certain boxes containing memos, which were confiscated by the FBI from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, had been tampered with or mixed up. Consequently, two distinct chronologies emerged—one that was digitally scanned and another that adhered to the original physical arrangement of the documents within the boxes.
“Since the boxes were seized and stored, appropriate personnel have had access to the boxes for several reasons, including to comply with orders issued by this Court in the civil proceedings noted above, for investigative purposes, and to facilitate the defendants’ review of the boxes,” Smith’s team wrote. “There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.”
Smith’s team also admitted in a footnote that they had misled the court by claiming earlier that the evidence had been preserved in its original state. “The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” the footnote said.
