Donald Trump’s trial in Classified Documents case to begin on May 20 next year

Washington DC [US]: The trial of former US President Donald Trump in the Classified Documents case will start on May 20 next year, after the federal judge overseeing the matter set the date on Friday, New York Times reported.

Notably, this is a sort of middle position between the US government’s request to go to trial in December this year and Trump’s desire to push the proceeding until after the 2024 election. The matter pertains to the allegations on the former President of illegally retaining dozens of classified documents.

In her order, Judge Aileen M Cannon said the trial was to be held in her home courthouse in Fort Pierce, Fla., a coastal city two-and-a-half hours north of Miami that will draw its jury pool from several counties that Trump won handily in his two previous presidential campaigns, New York Times reported.

Judge Cannon also laid out a calendar of hearings, throughout the remainder of this year and into next year, including those concerning the handling of the classified material at the heart of the case.

The scheduling order came after a contentious hearing on Tuesday at the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce where prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, and lawyers for Trump sparred over the date of the trial.

The timing of the proceeding is more important in this case than in most criminal matters because Trump is now the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination and his legal obligations to be in court will intersect with his campaign schedule, as per NYT.

The date Judge Cannon chose to start the trial — May 20, 2024 — falls after the bulk of the primary contests. But it is less than two months before the start of the Republican National Convention in July and the formal start of the general election season.

The Justice Department declined to comment on Judge Cannon’s decision. But it did not come as a surprise to prosecutors, who set their initial, aggressive timetable expecting that she would select a date, probably sometime in the first half of 2024, and reject the Trump legal team’s request to push it past the election, according to a person familiar with the situation.

In a 38-count indictment filed last month by Smith’s office, the former president was charged with illegally holding on to a trove of 31 documents containing sensitive national security information in violation of the Espionage Act.

He was also accused of conspiring with one of his personal aides, Walt Nauta, to obstruct the government’s repeated efforts to reclaim the documents.

Setting the schedule for Trump’s trial was the first significant decision in the case for Judge Cannon, who was interestingly, appointed by Trump only in 2020. She was randomly assigned to the case in June and faced enormous scrutiny after having made some rulings last year in a related matter that were favourable to Trump and that were ultimately overturned in a stinging reversal by a federal appeals court, as per New York Times.