WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Florida has scheduled a trial date for next May for former President Donald Trump in a case charging him with illegally retaining hundreds of classified documents.
The May 20, 2024, trial date, set Friday by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, is a compromise between a request from prosecutors to set the trial for this December and a bid by defense lawyers to put it off indefinitely until sometime after the 2024 presidential election.
If the date holds, it would follow close on the heels of a separate New York trial for Trump on dozens of state charges of falsifying business records in connection with an alleged hush money payment to a porn actor.
Cannon
It also means the trial would not start until deep into the presidential nominating calendar and probably well after the Republican nominee is clear — though before that person is officially nominated at the Republican National Convention.
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In pushing back the trial from the Dec. 11 start date that the Justice Department had asked for, Cannon wrote that “the Government’s proposed schedule is atypically accelerated and inconsistent with ensuring a fair trial.”
She agreed with defense lawyers that the amount of evidence that would need to be sifted through before the trial, including classified information, was “voluminous and likely to increase in the normal course as trial approaches.”
“The Court finds that the interests of justice served by this continuance outweigh the best interest of the public and Defendants in a speedy trial,” Cannon wrote.
Trump could yet face additional trials in the coming year. He revealed this week that he received a letter informing him that he was a target of a separate Justice Department investigation into efforts to undo the results of the 2020 presidential election, an indication that charges could be coming soon.
Trump’s new lawyer in that investigation, John Lauro, told Fox News on Friday that prosecutors appeared to be accusing Trump of “some kind of effort to obstruct” the Jan. 6, 2021, counting of state electoral votes and “whether or not President Trump intimidated anyone or ballot stuffed.” He said Trump would not appear before a grand jury because “he did absolutely nothing wrong.”
“He’s done nothing criminal,” Lauro said. “And he’s made his case that he was entitled to take these positions as president of the United States. When he saw all these election discrepancies and irregularities going on, he did what any president was required to do because he took an oath to do exactly that.”
Judges appointed by Trump and Trump’s own attorney general said there was no evidence of widespread fraud that could have affected the outcome of the election.
Prosecutors in Georgia, meanwhile, plan to announce charging decisions within weeks in an investigation into attempts by Trump and his allies to subvert the vote in that state.
The trial before Cannon would take place in a federal courthouse in Fort Pierce.
It arises from a 38-count indictment last month, filed by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith, that accused Trump of willfully hoarding classified documents, including top secret records, at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach and conspiring with his valet, Walt Nauta, to hide them from investigators who demanded them back.
Trump and Nauta have both pleaded not guilty.
Meanwhile, Trump’s company and his former longtime lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen settled a lawsuit over Cohen’s claims that he was unfairly stuck with big legal bills after getting entangled in investigations into the former president.
Lawyers for the two sides disclosed the settlement during a videoconference with the judge Friday, three days before Cohen’s 2019 lawsuit was slated to go to trial in a Manhattan state court. Details of the agreement were not made public.
Cohen said Friday the matter “has been resolved in a manner satisfactory to all parties,” and his attorney, Lauren Handelsman, said the terms were confidential. Messages seeking comment were left with lawyers for Trump’s company, the Trump Organization.
Cohen claimed in his lawsuit that the Trump Organization promised to pay his legal expenses and did so for a time, footing more than $1.7 million in legal fees.
But, Cohen said, the company reneged after he started cooperating with federal prosecutors in their investigations related to Trump’s business dealings in Russia and attempts to silence women with embarrassing stories about his personal life.
Cohen’s then-lawyers stopped representing him after the company stopped paying. His lawsuit said that harmed his ability to respond to the federal investigations.
Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to charges admitting that he lied to Congress, violated campaign finance laws through excessive political contributions, lied to banks to obtain financing and evaded income taxes by failing to report more than $4 million in income.
He was sentenced to three years in prison, though he served nearly two-thirds of it at home, released after the COVID-19 outbreak overwhelmed the nation’s prisons.
