With less than six months until the November general presidential election, Trump and his legal team continue with their efforts to delay the start of trials in three of the four legal cases against the former president, including the Florida classified document case. Currently, the trial in the New York case is ongoing, but former president Donald Trump managed to successfully postpone the start of the Florida case trial with some help from the presiding judge, Aileen Cannon.
About the case
On June 8, 2023, former President Donald Trump and his aide Walt Nauta were indicted by a federal grand jury in the Southern District of Florida on charges related to the alleged mishandling of classified documents at Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago. A superseding indictment was unsealed on July 27, 2023, which charged an additional defendant, Carlos De Oliveira, and included three additional charges against Trump of evidence tampering, willfully retaining national defense information, and lying to investigators.
A complicated legal labyrinth
The trial in the Florida case was delayed mostly thanks to Judge Cannon’s controversial decisions after she and everyone else involved in the case, including the prosecution team, are part of the complicated legal labyrinth created by Trump’s lawyers. Former President Donald Trump’s legal team has used various defenses and attempts to delay the case, strategies that so far work in Trump’s favor with the ultimate goal of postponing the start of the trial until after the presidential elections. Trump looks forward to winning the election and ordering the Department of Justice to stop all cases against him or simply pardon himself.
Another Trump legal team’s play
Last week, Donald Trump’s legal team made a strategic attempt to dismiss his espionage indictment in Florida entirely. Their approach involved telling U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon that former President Bill Clinton “may still possess classified information” and yet has not faced any prosecutorial action. This accusation was one of several points made in a motion that argued Trump is being selectively prosecuted.
“Former President Clinton possessed, and may still possess, tapes that obviously contain classified information,” Trump’s lawyers wrote, referencing tapes they say Bill Clinton retained and later relied on for his 2004 book, “My Life.”
Identical situation
Trump, accused of keeping documents with nuclear secrets in his Mar-a-Lago property shower, argued that Clinton’s possession and subsequent use of those tapes is similar to his own situation because they contained “the type of information that the Special Counsel’s Office and the Intelligence Community have repeatedly claimed is classified and sensitive,” like military operations, intelligence analyses, communications with foreign leaders, and details of Clinton’s briefings on specific matters.
The extensive, over 100-page filing, full of exhibits implicating various officials Trump has criticized for years, seemed to predict that Judge Cannon might not be convinced to dismiss the case. In anticipation, Trump’s lawyers asked for a prompt hearing on their arguments.
The ongoing New York trial
On Monday, May 6, the judge overseeing Donald Trump’s criminal trial fined him $1,000 and found him in contempt of court for a 10th time due to repeated violations of a gag order. Justice Juan Merchan warned that any further breaches could lead to jail time for the former president. Merchan noted that the previous nine $1,000 fines hadn’t deterred the wealthy businessman and former President Trump, from breaking the order, which forbids him from speaking publicly about jurors and witnesses involved in the first criminal trial of a former U.S. president
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