Federal prosecutors on Thursday tore apart former President Donald Trump’s attempts to indefinitely delay his criminal trial for hoarding classified documents while he attempts a return to the White House, saying that they want to put him on trial before year’s end.
Trump recently asked U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon—whom he appointed while president and who has repeatedly issued unprecedented court orders siding with him—to freeze the case while he’s on the 2024 campaign trail.
But now Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team of Justice Department lawyers have ripped into Trump’s attempts to use his presidential run as an excuse to hit pause on the case, noting that the troubled politician is not as special as he thinks he is.
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“The demands of defendants’ professional schedules do not provide a basis to delay trial in this case. Many indicted defendants have demanding jobs that require a considerable amount of their time and energy, or a significant amount of travel. The Speedy Trial Act contemplates no such factor as a basis for a continuance, and the court should not indulge it here,” Smith’s team wrote in a court filing on Thursday.
The Department of Justice special counsel team also pushed back on Trump’s repeated claims that the Presidential Records Act somehow gave him the unchecked power to do whatever he wanted with top-secret records at his oceanside mansion, writing that the argument now made before a federal judge “borders on frivolous.”
“The defendants are, of course, free to make whatever arguments they like for dismissal of the indictment, and the government will respond promptly. But they should not be permitted to gesture at a baseless legal argument, call it ‘novel,’ and then claim that the court
will require an indefinite continuance in order to resolve it,” Smith’s team wrote.
The case that’s set to be the most historic trial in American history is also potentially complex, as the government’s lawyers must carefully navigate how to present evidence that the former president broke the law by unsafely storing some of the nation’s most valuable secrets—without exposing details that could harm national security.
Still, prosecutors asked Cannon to kick off the trial by commencing jury selection on December 11. If she agrees, Trump could be convicted—or acquitted—before some of the nation’s biggest primary elections.
