July 11, 2023
Former President Trump’s classified documents trial will begin on August 14…
Hold up – we’d like to go to trial on December 11.
Hold up – we want to postpone this trial indefinitely.
And there’s the question. When will former president trump actually go on trial over those classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago.
Late last night the former president’s legal team filed this motion to Florida federal judge Aileen cannon arguing that she should postpone the trial indefinitely – and if not indefinitely – then it should certainly be postponed until after the 2024 presidential election saying anytime before that would be “unreasonable, telling and would result in a miscarriage of justice.”
The trump team says they do *not* want a speedy trial for two main reasons. One is political and one is logistical. Logistically – trump’s lawyers say the Justice Department has been investigating all this classified documents stuff for more than a year and has collected more than 800,000 pages of documents and 57 terabytes of surveillance footage. The defense has to go through it all and they need time. But also they say the former president and his lawyers are dealing with other criminal and civil trials and don’t have time to prepare for this trial right now.
Politically, the trump team makes three arguments. One – they suggest this prosecution is purely political by a sitting President against his chief political rival – but there is no evidence of that in the document. Two — the former president is running for re-election and will likely become the Republican party nominee and he doesn’t have time to prepare for trial and that’s not fair. And three –they say – in an election year – it will be almost impossible to seat an impartial jury.
We’ll have to see what the judge rules on this – but next Tuesday the two sides will meet in that florida federal courtroom to discuss issues related to the handling of classified information as part of a future trial.
Read the Trump legal filing here.
