Federal Judge Suspends Key Deadline in Classified Documents Case Against Trump

A federal judge indefinitely postponed a deadline in former President Donald Trump’s classified materials case after special prosecutor Jack Smith’s team previously admitted that evidence was re-arranged.

Judge Aileen Cannon’s paperless order on Monday relates to a section of the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) that discloses what potentially classified material that President Trump’s lawyers would use during the trial as well as expert testimony.

The order, which did not provide a reason, also did not set a new date for the disclosures. “Order setting second set of pretrial deadlines [or] hearings to follow,” she wrote. Previously, President Trump and two co-defendants had a May 9 deadline to make their submissions under an order she issued last month.

Her decision could have significant bearing on when the trial date occurs as both President Trump’s team and special prosecutors have said that how classified materials should be handled during the trial could take months to resolve. Some legal analysts have previously said that it’s unlikely the trial will take place before the 2024 election, where President Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee for president.

In his four criminal cases, President Trump, who has pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him, has used legal tactics to delay his trials and attempted to appeal them on different grounds. One of his cases in Washington has been delayed for months as the U.S. Supreme Court weighs his team’s arguments on whether he should be declared immune from prosecution.

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In their filing last week, Mr. Smith’s office had said that the “size and shape of certain items in the boxes” could have led them to movement inside the boxes but insisted that it shouldn’t impact the case or the process around handling classified documents. However, prosecutors did not provide a clear reason why the materials moved around.

“For example, the boxes contain items smaller than standard paper such as index cards, books, and stationary, which shift easily when the boxes are carried, especially because many of the boxes are not full,” his team wrote last week.

Their filing added that a federal filter team tried to “ensure that no documents were moved from one box to another, but it was not focused on maintaining the sequence of documents within each box.”

“If the investigative team found a document with classification markings, it removed the document, segregated it, and replaced it with a placeholder sheet. The investigative team used classified cover sheets for that purpose, until the FBI ran out because there were so many classified documents, at which point the team began using blank sheets with handwritten notes indicating the classification level of the document(s) seized,” prosecutors also wrote.

The rearranging of the documents in question may have occurred after a special master who was appointed in the case reviewed the materials, Mr. Smith’s team wrote.

They wrote that after boxes were taken to an FBI Washington field office, agents “created an index to correlate the documents with classification markings to codes … and labeled the classified cover sheets in the boxes with the codes for the seized documents.”

“The FBI also generally replaced the handwritten sheets with classified cover sheets annotated with the index code, but regardless, any handwritten sheets that currently remain in the boxes do not represent additional classified documents—they were just not removed when the classified cover sheets with the index code were added,” it said. “In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet.”

President Trump has separately filed multiple motions seeking to dismiss the Florida charges against him. Judge Cannon has denied two that were argued in March, including one claim that said the Espionage Act statute at the heart of the case was unconstitutionally vague, while another asserted that the former president was entitled under the 1978 Presidential Records Act to retain the classified files as his personal property after he left the White House.

President Trump was charged with 40 counts of illegally retaining classified documents and trying to obstruct an investigation. He has pleaded not guilty, arguing that it’s part of an attempt to undermine his 2024 presidential campaign.

Valet Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira are also charged with obstructing an FBI investigation into the hoarding of classified documents at the former president’s Palm Beach estate. They have pleaded not guilty.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.