A Florida judge delayed Trump’s documents trial. Will it be held before Election Day?

The odds against Donald Trump facing trial before the presidential election on charges of withholding classified documents from the government at his Palm Beach estate rose dramatically Tuesday when a federal judge indefinitely postponed the former president’s originally scheduled May 20 trial.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over the documents case at the Fort Pierce federal courthouse, found that “the finalization of a trial date at this juncture ... would be imprudent and inconsistent with the court’s duty” to resolve numerous legal issues “necessary to present this case to a jury.”

Cannon rescheduled various pressing matters, including a motion to dismiss the indictment for selective and vindictive prosecution as well as the use of sensitive national security records at trial, through the end of July.

Her decision comes as Trump, the expected Republican nominee for president in November, is on trial in New York on criminal charges of paying hush money to a porn star, and hiding that in order to boost his election chances in the 2016 presidential election.

After hearing oral arguments in April, the U.S. Supreme Court is also preparing to issue an opinion on whether Trump has immunity against criminal prosecution.

Hanging in the balance is not only Trump’s classified documents case but his federal trial in Washington, D.C., and state trial in Georgia on charges accusing him of interfering in the outcome of the November 2020 presidential election that he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. It is possible that the documents trial, along with the two others, could be postponed until after their expected rematch in the November election.

If Trump were to beat Biden in that race, then as president he would be in a position to ask the Justice Department to drop all of the pending charges against him.

Trump’s lawyers argued at a hearing in March in the Fort Pierce federal courthouse that he designated the documents as his own personal property when he took them from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach after leaving office and therefore he had the authority to keep them.

In her three-page order, Cannon rejected the Trump legal team’s reasoning, saying most of the counts in the indictment fall under the Espionage Act, which states that without authorization it is illegal to retain any national defense documents and fail to turn them over to the U.S. government. She noted that the indictment’s 32 espionage charges make no reference to the Presidential Records Act. She also pointed out that the remaining obstruction of justice and other charges are not based on the Presidential Records Act either.

“More generally, the superseding indictment specifies the nature of the accusations against Defendant Trump in a lengthy speaking indictment with embedded excerpts from investigative interviews, photographs, and other content,” Cannon wrote, emphasizing that the charges “track the statutory language” of the Espionage Act.

Previously, after the March 14 hearing in her courtroom, Cannon also rejected another dismissal motion by Trump’s lawyers, who argued that the Espionage Act was vague and should be struck down entirely.

In the classified documents case, Trump’s lawyers argued that he is “immune from prosecution ... because the charges turn on his alleged decision to designate records as personal under the Presidential Records Act and to cause the records to be moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago.

Justice Department lawyers on special counsel Jack Smith’s team urged Cannon to reject Trump’s dismissal motion, saying the former president had no legal right to retain the classified records at his Palm Beach estate as he refused to turn them over to federal authorities for storage at the National Archives in Washington.

The criminal case over Trump’s retention of classified documents was brought against the former president last June, and was expanded the following month in an indictment naming two other defendants: Walt Nauta, a former White House aide who still works with the ex-president, and Carlos De Oliveira, a property manager of his Mar-a-Lago estate.

The indictment, returned by a Miami federal grand jury, alleges Trump brought a few underlings at his Palm Beach estate into a close circle that prosecutors say assisted him in trying to hide boxes of classified documents from authorities and to delete video security footage of Mar-a-Lago’s storage area and nearby hallway linked to the residence.

According to the indictment, Trump spoke with De Oliveira for 24 minutes after the Justice Department informed his legal team on June 22, 2022, of a draft grand jury subpoena for the surveillance footage at Mar-a-Lago. Two days later, the subpoena was officially delivered to Trump’s residence.

On June 25, after changing his travel plans, Nauta flew to the Palm Beach estate. Then, on June 27, Nauta collaborated with De Oliveira to find and destroy the surveillance video, the indictment states.

The information provided the basis for FBI agents to obtain a court-approved warrant to search Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, 2022, when they found and seized more than 100 classified documents in the former president’s office and the club’s storage area.

Cannon was nominated by Trump and joined the federal bench in South Florida at the end of his term in 2020. She drew criticism after she made a controversial call in 2022 to appoint an independent expert, at Trump’s behest, to examine classified government materials seized by FBI agents from his Palm Beach residence before the former president was indicted the following year.