July 18 (UPI) — Former President Donald Trump faces his first pretrial hearing in his mishandling of classified documents case and could give some indication of how it could impact the 2024 presidential race.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon told government prosecutors and Trump’s legal teams, both of whom have requested delays in the case’s tentative August start date, to be prepared to discuss the timing of the case at the routine pretrial hearing.
Lawyers for Trump, and his co-defendant Walt Nauta, asked the court last week to delay the case until after the 2024 presidential election, stating that beginning a case “of this magnitude within six months of indictment is unreasonable, telling, and would result in a miscarriage of justice.”
Special Counsel Jack Smith last month had called for the case to be postponed from August to December of this year, noting the sensitive nature of the classified materials in the case would require special considerations.
Trump’s legal team requested the longer delay citing several other ongoing cases involving the two men, the fact that Trump and Nauta, his aide, would be on the campaign trail and potential difficulty seating a jury in December as the campaign would be ramping up.
Lawyers for Smith, however, pushed back on the defense team’s requests, saying it “borders on the frivolous.”
“There is no basis in law or fact for proceeding in such an indeterminate and open-ended fashion, and the defendants provide none,” wrote assistant special counsel David Harbach.
Smith had also called Tuesday’s proceedings a “critical step” in getting the high-profile case moving forward as the two sides will seek to reach an agreement on how classified documents will be handled in the case under the Classified Information Procedures Act.
Trump and Nauta face more than three dozen charges combined for mishandling classified documents and obstructing federal officials in trying to retrieve them. Both have entered not-guilty pleas in the charges against them.
Court filings released ahead of the indictment showed that the government had taken more than 320 documents with classification markings previously held by Trump. Because of the sensitive nature of the documents, Trump’s legal team will need clearance to view the documents.
The government issued a filing Monday requesting Cannon to order that Trump, Nauta and their legal teams to agree not to share any classified material before the prosecution is able to look over the evidence during pretrial discovery.
The decision on what the government will be required to share throughout the process will be left up to Cannon, who was appointed to the case by Trump.
Her decision earlier in the case to allow Trump to have an independent reviewer, known as a special master, to examine all the documents taken by the FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago home that was seen as highly favorable for Trump was ultimately overturned by an appeals court.