Trump’s ‘classified documents theft’ trial begins May 20, 2020
The alleged theft of confidential documents by Donald Trump is scheduled to begin on May 20 of the next year. His case will be presided over by Aileen Cannon, who was appointed to her position as a United States federal judge by Donald Trump when he was in office.
WASHINGTON: A federal judge in Florida has set the trial date for former President Donald Trump in the lawsuit charging him with illegally retaining hundreds of sensitive documents. The trial is expected to take place in May of next year.
The lawsuit will be presided over by United States District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was nominated by Trump in the year 2020. Her decision to hear the Trump case was based entirely on random chance, with the pool of active federal judges in the southern Florida district of the Justice Department serving as the source for the draw.
The trial date of May 20, 2024, which was set by Judge Cannon on Friday, is a compromise between a request by prosecutors to schedule the trial for this December and a push by defence lawyers to put it off indefinitely until sometime after the 2024 presidential election. The prosecutors wanted to set the trial for this December, and the defence lawyers wanted to put it off until sometime after the election.
If the date holds, it would follow closely on the heels of a separate trial for Trump in New York on hundreds of state charges of falsifying business records in connection with an alleged hush money payment to a porn actor. The allegations stem from an alleged payment of hush money to a porn actor. This also means that the trial would not begin until long into the process of nominating candidates for the presidency, and most likely not until much after the Republican nominee has been decided, despite the fact that this person would still be nominated formally at the Republican National Convention.
The Justice Department had requested that the trial begin on December 11, but Cannon pushed back the start date of the trial, writing that “the Government’s proposed schedule is atypically accelerated and inconsistent with ensuring a fair trial.”
She concurred with the defence attorneys’ assessment that the volume of material, which would need to be combed through before the trial, would be “voluminous” and “likely to increase in the normal course as trial approaches.” This evidence would include classified information.
“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. “The Court finds that the interests of justice served by this continuance outweigh the best interest of the public in a speedy trial.”
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