Lawyers for former President Donald Trump asked a federal judge on Monday night to indefinitely postpone his trial on charges of illegally retaining classified documents after he left office, saying that the proceeding should not begin until all “substantive motions” in the case had been presented and decided.
The written filing — submitted 30 minutes before its deadline of midnight — presents a significant early test for Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointed jurist who is overseeing the case. If granted, it could have the effect of pushing Trump’s trial into the final stages of the presidential campaign in which he is now the Republican front-runner or even past the 2024 election.
While timing is important in any criminal matter, it could be hugely consequential in Trump’s case, in which he stands accused of illegally holding on to 31 classified documents after leaving the White House and obstructing the government’s repeated efforts to reclaim them.
There could be complications of a sort never before presented to a court if Trump is a candidate in the last legs of a presidential campaign and a federal criminal defendant on trial at the same time. If the trial is pushed back until after the election and Trump wins, he could try to pardon himself after taking office or have his attorney general dismiss the matter entirely.
Some of the former president’s advisers have been blunt in private conversations that he is looking to winning the election as a solution to his legal problems. And the request for an open-ended delay to the trial of Trump and his co-defendant, Walt Nauta, a personal aide, presents a high-stakes question for Cannon, who came into the case already under scrutiny for making decisions favorable to Trump in the early phases of the investigation.
The filing came in response to one submitted last month by prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, who requested a trial date of Dec. 11. Cannon, appearing to adopt the brisk calendar mandated by the Speedy Trial Act, had initially scheduled the case to go to trial in August.
Judges have wide latitude to set schedules for trials, and scheduling orders are typically not subject to appeal to higher courts. That said, given the extraordinary nature of Trump’s case and the potential implications of a delay, prosecutors under Smith could in theory try to come up with a rationale to challenge a scheduling decision made by Cannon to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Trump’s lawyers pitched their request to Cannon as a plea for cautious deliberation and as a means of safeguarding democracy.
“This extraordinary case presents a serious challenge to both the fact and perception of our American democracy,” wrote the lawyers, Chris M. Kise and Todd Blanche for Trump, and Stanley Woodward Jr. and Sasha Dadan for Nauta.
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