. The trial will involve procedures under the
Classified Information Procedures Act. Under that act, the government plans to share classified documents relevant to the case with the defense as part of
discovery. On June 19, a judge issued a protective order that restricted Trump to viewing the relevant documents under his attorneys' supervision and explicitly prohibited him from publicly discussing the evidence, as DOJ had requested three days earlier.
2023 By the third week of June, the government began disclosing unclassified evidence to the defense as part of the discovery process. of this set, about 4,500 pages were designated as "key" documents, the most crucial evidence. On July 18, lawyers for Trump and Nauta attended the first pretrial conference, while Trump went to Iowa for a televised campaign event with
Sean Hannity. Several days later, the judge set another pretrial hearing for May 14, 2024. At an October 12 hearing, Cannon complained that prosecutors had introduced new arguments during oral argument and said she would potentially schedule further hearings about the matter in the future. Following a September 12 hearing (postponed from August 25), Cannon prohibited Trump from commenting on classified evidence. Earlier in 2023, in a different case, Cannon closed jury selection to the public on the basis that the courtroom was too small, which according to some was a constitutional error. Trump's trial was scheduled for the same courtroom. In November, it was reported that Mar-a-Lago staff, including the person who cleaned Trump's bedroom, may be called to testify.
2024 On February 6, 2024, Cannon ruled that witnesses' names could be made public, as the government had not explained its concerns related to "witness safety and intimidation". Two days later, the government asked her to reconsider. On April 9, Cannon ruled that witnesses in the case could remain private, reversing her prior decision. However, Cannon also did turn down a request seeking the sealing of substantive witness statements. On February 12, Trump attended a hearing to determine whether prosecutors could withhold some classified evidence from the defense. The hearing was closed-door and in a
sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF). On February 22, Trump's lawyers made multiple court filings asking for the case to be dismissed. On March 14, Cannon heard two of these motions, and she immediately rejected Trump's request to dismiss the case based on his claim that the Espionage Act was vague, though she is open to hearing his arguments about the law's vagueness as part of the case. Trump's second claim was that a president may keep any government documents he wishes under the Presidential Records Act. On April 4, Cannon denied Trump's motion to dismiss the indictment. Trump had claimed that a president, under the Presidential Records Act, may keep any government documents he wishes. Cannon ruled that the Presidential Records Act provides no "basis to dismiss" the charges. On May 6, Cannon delayed a major deadline for the defendants to submit court filings (which had been set for May 9). She did this after it was revealed that prosecutors had shuffled the order of documents within each box while reviewing the boxes. As prosecutors acknowledged in writing: "The filter team took care 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." Trump attorney Todd Blanche described this as "the
spoliation of this evidence" and said that prosecutors had committed an ethical breach by not revealing it promptly. On May 7, Cannon canceled the May 20 trial date and wrote that it would be "imprudent and inconsistent" to finalize a new trial date before resolving pretrial issues. She issued a new pretrial schedule, under which defendants' motions to dismiss will be heard May 22 and June 21, there is a CIPA deadline on June 17 (delayed from May 9), defendants’ combined speedy trial report will be due July 19, and a status conference and a CIPA hearing will be held on July 22. On May 22, a new pre-trial hearing was held concerning motions to dismiss brought forth by Nauta on the grounds of "vindictive prosecution" and by Trump and his co-defendants concerning "technical flaws" within the indictment. Stanley Woodward alleged that prosecutor
Jay Bratt had once referenced the fact that Woodward had been recommended for a judgeship, as if to threaten him if he did not succeed in convincing Nauta to cooperate. Prosecutor David Harbach pointed out that Woodward did not report the alleged incident until months after the August 2022 meeting at which it supposedly happened. Prior to the hearing, the release of previously sealed court files revealed that a federal judge had previously found that there was "sufficient evidence" that Trump obstructed justice, enabling investigators to obtain information that would normally be protected under
attorney-client privilege. The judge, in doing so, had cited the fact that Trump attorneys had found further documents in Trump's bedroom. On May 24, Jack Smith's office asked Cannon to place a gag order on Trump related to his "repeated mischaracterization" of the actions of law enforcement officials. Three days earlier, Trump had begun falsely claiming that Joe Biden had been ready to kill him during the FBI search, an unprecedented accusation. In making this accusation, Trump was referencing a standard law enforcement policy, a copy of which had been attached to the FBI's description of the planned search of Mar-a-Lago, which states that officers are authorized to use lethal force if there is "imminent danger of death or serious physical injury". The FBI had taken steps to ensure that Trump would not be present during the search and had given advance notice to the Secret Service. On May 27, Trump's lawyers said that the gag order request was an "extraordinary, unprecedented, and unconstitutional censorship application" and was "bad-faith behavior" on the part of government prosecutors. On May 28, Cannon denied the request, saying that prosecutors had not given sufficient advance notice to the defense. On June 5, Cannon postponed a multi-day proceeding for Trump's team to question federal officials under oath, and she did not set a new date for it. On June 10, Cannon denied a motion to dismiss by Trump who claimed the indictment was improper; however, Cannon struck a paragraph from Smith's superseding indictment, finding it "inappropriate". They were to include the prosecution request for a gag order, the defense request to have Jack Smith's appointment as special counsel declared invalid, and the defense request to throw out evidence seized by the FBI or provided by Evan Corcoran. Following hearings on June 21 and 24, the prosecution submitted a 30-page court filing in which they reaffirmed that they had maintained the "integrity of each container in which the evidence was found, that is, box-to-box integrity." Given "the haphazard manner" in which Trump had combined "some of the nation's most highly guarded secrets" with "newspapers, thank you notes, Christmas ornaments, magazines, clothing, and photographs of himself and others", investigators having further shuffled the material within each seized box should not be "critical to his defense", they argued. They also pointed out that the defense's new argument that the order of the documents inside each box could prove Trump's unawareness of their presence contradicts the defense's previous claim that Trump had declassified the documents and designated them as his personal property. The third day of hearings was June 25. Following that, Cannon did not rule from the bench. On June 27, regarding Trump's motion to suppress the use of certain evidence, Cannon said an evidentiary hearing was justified. At such a hearing, she would hear witness testimony and review evidence to decide whether it could be used at trial. She did not set a date for the evidentiary hearing. She requested more information about the FBI warrant for the 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago and about Corcoran's grand jury testimony. On July 5, Trump's team requested a new schedule to reflect the recent outcome of
Trump v. United States in which the Supreme Court gave former presidents presumptive immunity for official acts. The next day, to allow briefs to be submitted on the issue, Cannon paused filing deadlines for two weeks.
Trump's request to indefinitely delay trial Cannon set an administrative placeholder date for a trial. The prosecution requested that the trial start on December 11, 2023—a relatively short delay—to give the defense more time to review discovery material, obtain security clearance, and properly handle classified evidence. In its reply two days later, prosecutors argued that there was "no basis in law or fact" for such an "indeterminate and open-ended" delay, and they asked for trial to begin December 11. In October, the Trump team asked to delay the trial until after the 2024 election. On November 10, Cannon said it was too early to decide whether to delay the trial. She delayed deadlines for filing and responding to motions, and she said she would reconsider the trial date at a March 1, 2024 scheduling conference. On November 16, Cannon said she would likewise wait until the March 1 hearing to give Trump a deadline for saying which classified evidence he will use at trial. That deadline would likely be about one month from the time it is set; if so, it would be an April deadline. Because of the sequential nature of pretrial deadlines under the Classified Information Procedures Act, Cannon's decision had, according to
The Guardian, effectively delayed the trial by four months. At the March 1 hearing, Cannon did not make any decisions. Prosecutors proposed holding the trial on July 8. The defense continued to request that the trial be held after the election, but proposed August 12 as an alternative, a date that might overlap (and therefore interfere) with the trial on
federal charges of election obstruction. On March 18, Cannon gave each side two weeks to propose jury instructions. Each side must provide two sets: an instruction for the jury to decide whether each of the various records Trump kept should be considered "personal" or "presidential" under the Presidential Records Act, and another instruction that assumes Trump was permitted to take anything he wanted anyway. On April 2, the special prosecutor said that these different interpretations of the Presidential Records Act are irrelevant to assessing whether Trump violated the Espionage Act. In an April 14 court filing, Smith asked that the defendants "not be allowed to use their overlapping engagements to perpetually delay trial". == Dismissal ==