Lawyers for former president Donald Trump and his longtime personal aide Waltine Nauta urged a federal judge on Tuesday not to schedule a trial on charges that Trump mishandled classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach until at least after the November 2024 election.
They cited overwhelming numbers of documents and other evidence that they have been unable to review and argued that they still need more time before they can file pretrial motions in the case.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon did not set a date during the roughly two-hour hearing but said she would rule “promptly,” and she also denied a government motion laying out the provisions for handling the classified documents until the two sides could consult with each other on unspecified objections being raised by the defense.
Appearing before Cannon in Fort Pierce, Trump defense lawyers Todd Blanche and Christopher Kise accused the government of being “intellectually dishonest” by characterizing the case as a standard one that could be prosecuted without regard for Trump’s stature as a former president who is running for reelection against an opponent whose administration is prosecuting him.
But prosecutors said that Trump deserved no special treatment. “He should be treated like anybody else,” prosecutor David Harbach said. “He is no different than any other busy, important person.”
Cannon had scheduled Tuesday’s hearing to discuss a roadmap for handling the sensitive papers in the case, and also had said she expected both sides to be prepared to discuss the government’s proposal to start the trial in December.
The defense lawyers argued that the former president faces other legal challenges where in some instances the lawyers in the secret documents case represent the same client in those other cases.
Kise also referred to reports on Tuesday that Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is prosecuting Trump in the documents case, has informed the former president in a letter that he is a target in the criminal probe of the efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
While the former president did not appear at the hearing, his personal aide Waltine Nauta attended with his two lawyers, Stanley Woodward Jr. of Washington, D.C., and Sasha Dadan of Fort Pierce.
At one point Woodward suggested that he might eventually seek a separate trial for Nauta, because most of the counts in the 37-count indictment are unrelated to Nauta. Woodward said he’s not suggesting he will file such a motion, but he said he needed time to examine the evidence collected by the government to make that determination.
Cannon has set a preliminary trial date for Aug. 14, a routine action designed to comport with the defendants’ speedy trial rights under the law. The government had asked to move the trial to December, but Trump’s lawyers emphatically declared in a filing last week that they are seeking anything but a speedy trial.
During Tuesday’s hearing she signaled doubts about the government’s proposed trial schedule, which calls for jury selection on Dec. 11.
“These matters often require more time given the amount of confidential information at issue,” she said.
As they did in court papers, the government repeated its argument the case is not complex, and the government also rebutted a defense argument that there is an “intersection” between the classified documents at issue in the case and the Presidential Records Act.
“All presidential records belong to the U.S. government at the end of the presidency,” said prosecutor Jay Bratt. He called the defense argument about the relationship between the two a red herring.
The government said it had turned over most of the unclassified evidence to the defense, including grand jury transcripts and tapes chronicling the movement of Trump employees, including Nauta, at Mar-a-Lago.
Tight restrictions
The 1980 Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) allows a judge to bar the entry of classified papers into evidence or to approve summaries or redacted documents for a jury’s review. The law was designed, legal experts say, to avoid “graymail,” the threat of revealing national secrets as way to manipulate legal proceedings.
Ahead of trial, the government lawyers can ask the court to limit the evidence they offer to the defense. In turn, defense lawyers must inform the government and judge what it wants introduced on their clients’ behalf.
According to a Department of Justice synopsis of CIPA, it’s up to the prosecutors to take “reasonable precautions against the unauthorized disclosure of classified information during the case. This responsibility applies both when the government intends to use classified information in its case-in-chief as well as when the defendant seeks to use classified information in his/her defense.”
