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Left: Special Counsel Jack Smith. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)/Center: In this image from video provided by the U.S. Senate, Aileen M. Cannon speaks remotely during a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight nomination hearing to be U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on July 29, 2020./Right: Donald Trump speaks with supporters at the Westside Conservative Breakfast, June 1, 2023, in Des Moines, Iowa. AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File)
In a new motion, special counsel Jack Smith shredded Donald Trump’s latest attempt to indefinitely delay the classified documents case in Florida before U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, urging the court to resist the former president’s efforts to “stop at nothing” to delay facing a jury.
“Their objective is plain — to delay trial as long as possible. And the tactics they deploy are relentless and misleading — they will stop at nothing to stall the adjudication of the charges against them by a fair and impartial jury of citizens. The Court should promptly reject the defendants’ motion,” Smith wrote in the 9-page brief filed in Florida late Thursday.
A tentative May 20 trial date has been set but it increasingly looks like that won’t get off the ground as Cannon has agreed to extend deadlines for other pretrial issues. For now, the next hearing approaches on March 1 when federal prosecutors and Trump’s lawyers will convene to discuss the schedule.
Meanwhile, Smith is eager to keep things on track and in the terse motion, lamented to Cannon that Trump’s pretrial motions for the indictment were due in November and yet, he reminded her, that deadline was vacated the same day.
Trump’s lawyers were either simply unprepared or were flatly ignoring court orders, according to the special counsel, and now, three months on, as Trump’s team has filed requests to adjourn the case completely, they still come asking for more time to file pretrial documents.
“This sequence of events fully exposes the defendants’ motive here: to achieve delay,” Smith wrote.
Most offensive to the special counsel is Trump’s attempt to dismiss the 40-some charges he faces for alleged illegal retention of sensitive and classified documents by attempting to advance an argument of “presidential immunity.”
The conduct charged took place after Trump left office, Smith wrote.
“The only purpose for such a frivolous motion in this case would be to artificially create a new avenue for potential delay, this time by attempting to manufacture an opportunity for a frivolous interlocutory appeal. It is another transparent effort to stall the trial,” the motion states.
The immunity argument has become de facto for Trump regardless of the venue where he is charged. Despite losing hugely with this argument at the appeals court in Washington, D.C., as he has tried to throw off his criminal indictment there for allegedly conspiring to subvert the 2020 election, his lawyers in Florida nonetheless told Cannon this week:
Defendants currently plan to file on February 22, at minimum, a series of motions to dismiss the Superseding Indictment and certain of the charges therein. Specifically, although the defense is still evaluating potential motions, we expect to file motions on February 22 relating to, inter alia, presidential immunity, the Presidential Records Act, President Trump’s security clearances, the vagueness doctrine, impermissible preindictment delay, and selective and vindictive prosecution.
Trump’s lawyers have also said they need an extension because of prosecutors’ Jan. 26 disclosure of 2,100 pages into discovery. Before Trump was indicted, Smith says his lawyers had a chance to familiarize themselves with these records.
“There is much that the defendants did not tell the Court in trotting out their complaint about the 2,100 pages. That is because the full story undermines their request. The government’s recent production of materials was in response to a specific request by Trump,” Smith wrote.
Specifically, the materials revolve around a motion prosecutors also filed in Washington, D.C., long before the Florida indictment was returned. Trump didn’t mention this in his last filing, nor did he mention that he participated in those proceedings and had access to the same materials as prosecutors did, minus ex parte records.
Those ex parte records, which comprise 1,025 pages, were also “provided to all of the defendants months ago in discovery,” Smith wrote. [Emphasis original]
Prosecutors were doing him a “courtesy,” Smith added.
