In the case involving the confidential materials presented by Special Counsel Jack Smith, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has handed former President Donald Trump a significant legal victory.
On Monday, Cannon granted the Trump legal team’s request to extend the deadline until May 9. According to Newsweek, the deadlines for two of his co-defendants were also extended.
The allegation from the outlet went on, “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 allegation from the outlet went on, “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.”
In response to accusations that he unlawfully kept classified materials after leaving the White House in January 2021 and obstructed the FBI effort to obtain them, Trump entered a not guilty plea to 40 criminal charges. Although none of them were charged similarly, it has been discovered that former Vice President Mike Pence, former President Bill Clinton, his national security advisor Sandy Berger, and former Vice President and current President Joe Biden all had secret papers in their possession in recent decades.
Former Special Counsel Robert Hur concluded that Biden had unlawfully obtained secret materials but refused to charge him, citing Biden’s diminished mental state.
On May 20, the trial is expected to start. Newsweek pointed out that Cannon failed to set a new deadline for Trump to submit his CIPA-related paperwork, which could mean that the trial won’t happen until November 2024, the year of the election.
With regard to the classified materials the defendants want to utilise in the trial and the expert witnesses Trump’s legal team wants to call in the Florida trial, Cannon filed court documents on Monday that “temporarily stay” the CIPA motion.
The judge merely mentioned that there would be a “order setting second set of pretrial deadlines/hearings to follow,” without providing an explanation for the indefinite postponement of the May 9 CIPA date.
Cannon has yet to make a decision on a number of motions submitted by Trump and his two co-defendants, maintenance worker Carlos De Oliveira of Mar-a-Lago and assistant Walt Nauta, asking for the accusations pertaining to secret documents to be dropped. This can cause more delays in the trial’s scheduled commencement date.
Following a filing that Smith’s prosecutors submitted to Cannon’s court late last week, in which they acknowledged manipulating evidence from an FBI raid at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2023 and deceiving the judge for a while about certain aspects of the evidence and findings, Cannon granted Trump’s request for a delay.
Legal experts told Just the News that the discovery might cause major issues for prosecutors and violate the court’s directive to keep evidence in the state in where it was taken.
In some of the memo boxes that the FBI took from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, the documents’ chronological order was changed or jumbled, leading to two different chronologies: one that was digitally scanned and another that adhered to the physical order in the boxes, according to a filing made by Smith’s team on Friday.
Appropriate persons have had access to the boxes since they were seized and stored for a number of reasons, including to comply with directives given by this Court in the aforementioned civil processes, for investigation purposes, and to
and to facilitate the defendants’ review of the boxes,” Smith’s team wrote in the filing with Cannon’s court.
“There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,” the prosecutors wrote.
Smith’s team also admitted in a footnote that they had misled the court when they had claimed the material had not changed after it was confiscated.