Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over the classified documents case brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith against former President Donald Trump, has given the prosecution more tough news.
Smith appears to want the trial before the presidential election, but a decision by Cannon has all but assured that will not happen, MSN reported.
“In an order on Wednesday, Cannon said Trump had until May 9 to disclose which classified documents he would use for his defense,” the report said.
“Guardian reporter Hugo Lowell pointed out that special counsel Jack Smith had proposed March 18 for Trump to file his notice under Section 5 of the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA),” it said.
“That’s not an unreasonable length of time to give Trump — it’s typical to give defendants in NatSec cases several weeks to draft their Sec 5 notice so it’s sufficiently specific. But a May 9 deadline might be frustrating for the Special Counsel,” he said on X, formerly Twitter.
“Special Counsel proposed March 18 deadline for Trump to file his Sec 5 notice, in order to get to a July 2024 trial,” he said. “No way that is happening now, given deadline is 7 weeks later. But she also didn’t give Trump the June 17 deadline he wanted — so no 11th Circuit ammo either.”
Special Counsel Jack Smith and Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointed judge presiding over the former president’s classified documents case in Florida, are on a collision course.
In a desperate move, Smith filed an appeal, essentially demanding that Cannon decide jury instructions concerning the President Records Act (PRA).
Former President Donald Trump has maintained that the PRA gave him the right to declassify any documents discovered at Mar-a-Lago, including some that contained secrets related to national security.
Smith claims that a “fundamentally flawed legal premise” underlies Judge Cannon’s request for competing jury instructions.
Smith claims that if Judge Cannon concurs with the former president that the PRA does not distinguish between official records and private property, he would be able to file an appeal and request an immediate review. He goes on to say that such instructions would “distort the trial” if the case proceeds to trial.
“The PRA’s distinction between personal and presidential records has no bearing on whether a former President’s possession of documents containing national defense information is authorized under the Espionage Act, and the PRA should play no role in the jury instructions,” Smith said in the filing. “Indeed, based on the current record, the PRA should not play any role at trial at all.”
“Furthermore, Trump’s entire effort to rely on the PRA is not based on any facts,” Smith continues. “Instead, he has attempted to fashion out of whole cloth a legal presumption that would operate untethered to any facts — without regard to his actual decisions, his actual intent, the unambiguous definition of what continues personal records under the PRA, or the plainly non-personal content of the highly classified documents he retained.”
He concludes, “There is no basis in law or fact for that legal presumption, and the Court should reject Trump’s effort to invent one as a vehicle to inject the PRA into this case.”
