The FBI search at Trump's Mar-a-Lago home

Trump Mar-a-Lago classified files case: Judge sets 20 May trial date
Published 35 minutes ago
By Madeline Halpert
BBC News, New York

Former President Donald Trump will go on trial for alleged mishandling of classified documents in spring next year, a court has ruled.

Judge Aileen Cannon set the case for 20 May. Mr Trump had wanted the trial held after the November 2024 election. Prosecutors wanted it this year.

The high-profile case will begin with the election campaign in full swing.

Mr Trump, 77, faces serious charges over the storage of sensitive files at his Florida home.

Prosecutors say he illegally kept secret documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after he left office and obstructed government efforts to retrieve them.

The former president has maintained his innocence, lambasting the case as an attempt to destroy his election campaign.

On Friday, Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee, said the two-week trial would take place in Fort Pierce, Florida.

For prosecutors to secure a conviction in the Mar-a-Lago case, the jury's decision must be unanimous.

Jurors will be selected from around the Fort Pierce division, which includes several counties that Mr Trump won in 2020.

The former president pleaded not guilty to 37 federal counts during an arraignment in Miami last month.

Lawyers for both sides argued in the Fort Pierce court earlier this week over when the case should be held.

Prosecutors said the evidence was not complicated and there was no need to delay the trial. They wanted it to begin in December.

But lawyers for Mr Trump had argued that the "extraordinary" nature of the case required more time to prepare.

They said their client could not get a fair trial before the November 2024 election.

Opinion polls indicate Mr Trump is the runaway front-runner in the race to become the Republican party candidate who will challenge the Democratic nominee, in all likelihood President Joe Biden, next year.

Key dates for Trump next year

15 January: Republican voters will begin the state-by-state process of picking their party's presidential nominee in so-called primary elections, the first one being in Iowa
5 March: Super Tuesday, when voters in 14 states, including California and Texas, go to the polls. The nominee will probably be unofficially confirmed at this point
20 May: Mr Trump's criminal trial in classified documents case begins in Florida
15-18 July: The Republican National Convention - to formally crown the party's presidential nominee - takes place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

The Mar-a-Lago case is one of several legal challenges Mr Trump is facing.

In April, he was charged with falsifying business records in the state of New York.

Mr Trump announced this week that he expected to be arrested soon in connection with a federal inquiry into the US Capitol riot two years ago and his efforts to challenge the 2020 election results.

State prosecutors in Atlanta, Georgia, are also investigating whether the former president broke the law with his attempts to overturn the poll results in that state three years ago.

Department of Justice-appointed special counsel Jack Smith is leading twin investigations into the Capitol riot and the Mar-a-Lago files.

In an indictment last month, his prosecutors alleged that when Mr Trump left office, he took about 300 classified documents to his oceanfront home in Palm Beach.

They say he stored the sensitive documents in several spaces, including a ballroom and a bathroom.

According to prosecutors, Mr Trump also told a personal aide, Walt Nauta, to move boxes containing classified files from a storage room at the resort before federal investigators came to look for them.

Mr Nauta is also charged in the case and has pleaded not guilty.

Judge Cannon Deals Huge Blow To Special Counsel Jack Smith
Martin Walsh, August 7, 2023

Judge Aileen Cannon of the Southern District of Florida invalidated two of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s sealed filings on Thursday.

Kyle Cheney, a senior legal correspondent for POLITICO, wrote via X (Twitter): “Judge CANNON comes out swinging at special counsel this morning, striking two of prosecutors’ sealed filings and demanding an explanation of ‘the legal propriety of using an out-of-district grand jury proceeding to continue to investigate’ the docs case.”

Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee, wrote that “The Special Counsel states in conclusory terms that the supplement should be sealed from public view ‘to comport with grand jury secrecy,’ but the motion for leave and the supplement plainly fail to satisfy the burden of establishing a sufficient legal or factual basis to warrant sealing the motion and supplement.”

She then denied the motion by the prosecution.

“Among other topics as raised in the Motion, the response shall address the legal propriety of using an out-of-district grand jury proceeding to continue to investigate and/or to seek post-indictment hearings on matters pertinent to the instant indicted matter in this district,” she wrote, adding that the prosecution to respond to these and other items by August 22nd.

Conservative reporter Julie Kelly tweeted: “I told you Judge Cannon is legit. She is not going to tolerate Jack Smith’s bullsh*t. This is gold–she asks defense to raise possible grand jury abuse by DOJ for conducting nearly all of the investigation in DC then switching to FLA at last minute for indictment.”

Kelly added that “Cannon also won’t tolerate DOJs nonstop requests for secrecy. She already denied a govt motion asking to keep names of 80+ witnesses under seal.”





Over the weekend, Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz threatened to call Jack Smith before a congressional committee after the special counsel filed new charges against Trump.

The felony charges — which include conspiracy to defraud the United States — are part of the investigation into alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election leading up to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

Gaetz took Smith to task, as well as fellow Republicans, after the filing.

“House Republicans should immediately demand that Jack Smith present himself for a transcribed interview with the Judiciary Committee in the next 15 days.,” Gaetz said in a Newsmax interview he posted to YouTube.

“If he does not do that, we should send a subpoena. If he ignores the subpoena, we should hold him in criminal contempt of the Congress, so that he is the first prosecutor in American history to prosecute a case while himself under criminal contempt,” Gaetz added.

He also said he is prepared to try and force U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s hand on the matter.

“If Merrick Garland doesn’t enforce that contempt, then we ought to impeach Merrick Garland,” he said.

“To showcase how political and indeed dirty this has all become, we can utilize congressional immunities to immunize President Trump,” he added, citing a section of statutory law, since upheld by the Supreme Court, that “gives any committee or subcommittee of the Congress the power to subpoena a witness, bring them in and partially immunize them.”

Trump Lawyers Use Jack Smith’s Secret Grand Jury Against Him
Jose Pagliery
Mon, August 21, 2023 at 3:02 AM MDT

Trumpworld lawyers are trying to flip the script in the Mar-a-Lago case, citing “potential grand jury abuse” over the way Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith keeps running what appears to be a parallel investigation in Washington.

And unlike other defense delay tactics, this one could actually affect the Department of Justice’s criminal case against former President Donald Trump for mishandling classified documents and hoarding them at his oceanside Mar-a-Lago estate in South Florida.

Smith now faces increasing pressure from U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who was appointed by Trump himself and has already ruled heavily in his favor despite all odds.

“She’s asking questions which are legitimate to be asked,” said University of Missouri law school professor emeritus Frank Bowman. “Although I’ve been pretty critical of previous rulings by Judge Cannon in this case—which are so bad as to have been absolutely inexplicable—nonetheless, at least at this point, there’s nothing untoward in her asking for some explanation of what special counsel’s up to.”

Smith’s prosecutors are now being cornered and forced to explain an objectively weird scenario: There appears to be an ongoing grand jury—whose proceedings are secret—in the nation’s capital long after a Miami grand jury already issued an indictment in June.

To defense lawyers representing Trump’s Diet Coke valet, Walt Nauta, the existence of an ongoing D.C. grand jury is like taking two bites of the same apple. And Trump’s defense lawyers are raising objections before Cannon.

“The government has engaged in multiple improprieties including, [among other things], convening a grand jury in a far-away district ostensibly to obtain evidence with respect to an indictment that was previously returned in the instant district,” Stanley E. Woodward Jr. and Sasha Dadan wrote in a court memo filed Friday.

It could amount to nothing more than a distraction to slow down Smith, who has been doggedly circling the former president in recent months. He revised the Mar-a-Lago indictment in July, slapping Trump with additional criminal charges for trying to orchestrate a coverup of the original crime. And more charges could be pending, given that there are still believed to be boxes of classified records missing from Mar-a-Lago that ended up in the real estate tycoon’s golf club residence at Bedminster, New Jersey.

But it could also allow Cannon to take decisive steps to limit the DOJ’s ongoing investigation, according to two other former prosecutors who have extensive experience with grand juries and spoke on background.

According to federal court rules, prosecutors must empanel a grand jury to consider criminal charges against someone in the same area where a crime was committed. That’s why federal prosecutors in Virginia are the ones who hunt down government contractors living in the D.C. suburbs who become spies—and it’s why the feds in New York City routinely crack down on Wall Street’s financial crimes. If the judge finds that Smith is somehow trying to cheat the system, she could punish the special counsel pursuing Trump.

Bowman, who spent several years as a federal prosecutor in South Florida and helped lead the criminal division there as its deputy chief, noted that the judge could take steps to limit Smith’s moves.

“It’s not going to result in a dismissal of the original indictment,” he said, adding that Cannon can decide “whether evidence can be used and whether sanctions can be brought against the Special Counsel’s office.”

A spokesman for Smith’s team would not answer any questions about the D.C. grand jury, refusing to even clarify whether the current one in question is the same grand jury that originally issued a subpoena to Trump seeking classified records at Mar-a-Lago last year.

However, Smith’s position as a DOJ special counsel with nationwide jurisdiction also grants him leeway that might indeed allow him to use grand juries all over the place. Unlike the U.S. attorneys who are appointed by the president to oversee particular local federal districts, a special counsel operates at a national scale—much like the prosecutors at DOJ headquarters in Washington who can splice up aspects of an investigation in districts across the country. And that means Smith can spin up a grand jury wherever his investigators perceive a crime to have taken place—even if it’s only part of the crime.

“He can operate in any federal district. Therefore, it’s not surprising or presumptively inappropriate for him to decide pieces of this investigation belong in District A while the center of gravity is in District B, and we’ll have a grand jury in A and B,” Bowman said. “He’s a different kind of bird than other US attorneys, which is one of the reasons why his method of proceeding here may seem unfamiliar.”

So far, Smith’s team has said very little about this other secretive grand jury up north.

But earlier this month, prosecutors revealed that this particular panel has “continued to investigate further obstructive activity.” Whatever it found seems to have fueled the superseding indictment that Smith filed on July 27 hitting Trump with additional criminal charges.

Days after informing Cannon about this other grand jury, the judge issued a strongly worded order asking defense lawyers to “address the legal propriety of using an out-of-district grand jury,” teeing up the current legal fight.

But the latest court filing by defense lawyers is a head-scratcher, raising even more questions about what exactly federal investigators have discovered—and hinting at even more misbehavior by Trump and his Mar-a-Lago employees.

In Friday’s court filing, Nauta’s lawyers complained about Smith’s use of a D.C. grand jury to bolster his overall investigation, arguing that it may not “be used for the purpose of garnering additional evidence to support the already-issued indictment, or to obtain pretrial discovery or engage in trial preparation.”

Raising even more eyebrows, there’s a footnote saying that “former President Trump, though counsel, joins in this submission to the extent it addresses the legal propriety of using an out-of-district grand jury proceeding to continue to investigate.” Notably, it’s the same court filing in which defense lawyers assert that there’s no conflict of interest in the way they’re representing Nauta, Mar-a-Lago employee Carlos De Oliveira, and an unindicted witness in the case, raising the specter that perhaps the feds suspect an even wider coverup scheme to shut people up.

It’s clear Trump’s lawyers want the judge to shut down this other grand jury before it’s too late—and before it uncovers anything else.

oliver clotheshoffe wrote:

Funny how they never threw this much of a tantrum over the classified documents Biden kept in his garage.

We'll have to wait for the conservatives to take over first.

Trump Reveals Details Of ‘Secret Document’ Discussed During Audio Recording
Jon Dougherty, October 8, 2023

Former President Donald Trump recently revealed new details about a purported “secret document” that he previously discussed in an audio recording which is at the center of special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment regarding his possession of classified documents.

As a recap, over the summer, Smith filed 37 counts against Trump in the case, all pertaining to his alleged mishandling of classified documents. If the former president is found guilty of all these charges, it could lead to severe consequences, including the possibility of facing decades in prison.

According to Smith’s indictment, Trump allegedly showed classified materials to individuals who did not possess the required government security clearances on at least two occasions. According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), both incidents occurred at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J.

Details regarding one of the alleged instances were leaked to CNN.

On June 2, CNN reported that federal prosecutors had obtained an audio recording of a meeting that Trump took part in during the summer of 2021. In this recording, Trump reportedly acknowledges that he kept a classified Pentagon document related to a potential attack on Iran, an allegation that seems to undermine the 45th president’s previous claim that he moved to declassify all relevant information he kept in his possession before he left office, under provisions of the Presidential Records Act.

The charges “include willful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, a scheme to conceal, and false statements and representations,” ABC News reported.

In a subsequent wide-ranging Fox News interview with Bret Baier, Trump said that he never showed anyone the classified U.S. military plan referred to in the audio recording to anyone.

Trump vehemently maintained that he never revealed any classified military strategy for attacking Iran, which U.S. Army General Mark Milley, the now-former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reportedly prepared. He also told Baier that he never ordered the military to formulate such an attack plan.

On July 21, 2021, the meeting took place at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, around six months after Trump’s presidency came to an end. In attendance were a writer, publisher, and two aides of the former president, and the main focus of the meeting revolved around a forthcoming book authored by Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff.

Per the indictment, at the meeting, Trump said he found Milley’s “plan of attack.” But he denied ordering Milley to create such a plan and said it was a misconception.

“I never ordered that to happen, no,” Trump told Baier.

Former Trump administration officials have since gone public to say the “secret plan” of attack against Iran that Trump allegedly showed off in the summer of 2021 never actually existed.

Last month, Smith’s team admitted to the federal judge overseeing Trump’s classified documents case that they incorrectly stated they turned over evidence as required by law.

Prosecutors discovered that the video used as evidence “had not been processed and uploaded to the platform established for the defense to view” when they were getting ready to indict Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira for allegedly conspiring with Trump to delete surveillance footage from the estate, Smith’s team wrote in a filing.

“The Government’s representation at the July 18 hearing that all surveillance footage the Government had obtained pre-indictment had been produced was therefore incorrect,” the prosecutors added.

All CCTV footage obtained by the government has now been given to the defendants, according to Smith’s team. The so-called Brady rule requires prosecutors to disclose all evidence and information favorable to the defendant.

BREAKING: Judge Strikes Down Jack Smith’s Absurd Request In Trump Case
By Mark Steffen, October 17, 2023; Updated:October 18, 2023

Biden Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith suffered a setback in court Tuesday as the judge presiding over his classified documents case against former President Donald Trump ruled that he is not entitled to hoard the documents in a private facility outside of the Florida district.

Smith previously requested approval from Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, to keep the documents obtained from the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago in a secure facility in Washington, D.C., more than 1,000 miles away from the Southern District of Florida where the case against former President Donald Trump is taking place. Judge Cannon ruled Thursday that Smith must share the documents with Trump’s legal team in a location convenient to them.

“The parties are advised the production of classified discovery to defense counsel is deemed timely upon placement in an accredited facility in the Southern District of Florida, not in another federal district,” Cannon wrote. “It is the responsibility of the Office of the Special Counsel to make and carry out arrangements to deposit such discovery to defense counsel in this District.”


The decision is another good sign for President Trump and builds on Judge Cannon’s previous decision this summer denying Smith the opportunity to shield his list of 84 witnesses from the president’s legal team. Smith argued that President Trump’s frequent criticisms of his court cases on social media threaten to prejudice or intimidate witnesses who might see their names made public.

Court observers have added that Smith is relying on a perforated legal strategy more tailored to enflaming the emotions of jurors than presenting unbiased facts. They cited as an example Smith’s use of words like “fraud/fraudulent,” used 63 times, “false/falsely” 94 times, five mentions of “fake” and three uses of the word “sham.” Some of them predicted that much of the government’s case against Trump will be thrown out.

Smith is prosecuting President Trump under the 1917 Espionage Act, arguing the former president should have known better than to take documents containing classified national security secrets from the White House in the days following his departure. President Trump has denied the claim, saying he had the right to declassify all documents in his possession under the Presidential Records Act.

Alina Habba, one of the president’s most high-profile attorneys, has threatened Smith’s team with a wave of depositions to uncover bias in the case. She cited as example orders from FBI officers who raided Mar-a-Lago to turn off security cameras while the search was underway.

Team Trump Believes SCOTUS Can Bail Him Out of His Jan. 6 Case
Martin Walsh, October 30, 2023

Former President Donald Trump’s attorneys filed their first motion to dismiss the federal election interference case against their client, arguing that Trump has “absolute immunity” from prosecution for actions taken while he was president.

This is the first of what is most likely many motions to dismiss the case that Special Counsel Jack Smith has brought against Trump, accusing him of attempting to rig the 2020 election.

In August, Trump pleaded not guilty to charges that he had engaged in a “criminal scheme” to overturn the results of the 2020 election by enlisting a slate of so-called “fake electors,” using the Justice Department to conduct “sham election crime investigations,” trying to enlist the vice president to “alter the election results,” and promoting false claims of a stolen election as the

The ex-president has denied all allegations and called them “a persecution of a political opponent.”

James D. Zirin, a former federal prosecutor in New York’s Southern District, published an op-ed in The Hill detailing the argument of “immunity” and how the U.S. Supreme Court could soon make a huge decision on the question at hand.

Before facing any criminal charges, Trump fought off federal lawsuits that claimed he bore civil liability for the January 6 uprising.

In four cases filed in the same courthouse as Trump’s election subversion case in Washington, D.C., two federal judges have rejected Trump’s claim of absolute immunity to dismiss these lawsuits.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is currently considering an appeal in the case of U.S. Capitol Police Officer James Blassingame, for which oral arguments were held earlier this year. While the potential outcomes of the civil and criminal cases couldn’t be more different (monetary damages and jail time, respectively), they share a central issue: whether Trump is immune from prosecution for his actions as president.

Trump’s legal team plans to raise the issue of executive immunity “very soon” in criminal court, and a source familiar with their strategy said that this pending civil appeal is the best chance of getting the Supreme Court to rule on the matter.

The gamble, if successful, could delay or even derail the criminal case, the source claims. Since a decision in Blassingame before the D.C. Circuit is possible, the stakes have been raised to the Supreme Court, The Messenger noted.

The story of a Black police officer who faced a barrage of racist abuse and violence while defending the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, lies behind the case caption Blassingame v. Trump and the technical arguments over the reach of executive immunity.

After 17 years on the force, Blassingame claimed the day of the insurrection was unlike any other. Pro-Trump rioters allegedly called him the N-word “more times than he could count” and beat him “in his face, head, chest, arms, and what felt like every part of his body,” as stated in the lawsuit.

Blassingame said the attack had a “severe emotional toll” on him, and he continued to experience back pain months later. He says he got hurt because of Trump.

In February 2022, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled against Trump on immunity grounds in three lawsuits, including Blassingame’s.

Senior U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan reached a similar conclusion in a separate ruling, allowing a civil rights group’s lawsuit against Trump under the Ku Klux Klan Act, the civil analog of the Reconstruction-era civil rights law charged in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment, to move forward.

Immunity “does not protect acts that Former President Trump undertook outside the outer perimeter of his official duties,” Sullivan found months later in November.

According to the source, Trump’s legal team will argue that the criminal case should not proceed until Blassingame’s lawsuit is resolved because it represents the closest precedent to appellate review.

The Trump administration filed an appeal with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in August, claiming the lower court “erred when it held that President Trump’s speech on matters of public concern was not within the scope of his absolute presidential immunity.”

U.S. Circuit Judges Gregory Katsas, a Trump appointee, Judith Rogers, a Clinton appointee, and Sri Srinivasan, an Obama appointee, heard oral arguments in the case in December.

An appeals court could decide to review pre-trial motions concerning the immunity issue before his criminal cases go to trial, according to some legal experts.

The attorneys for Trump could file an interlocutory appeal, which is typically reserved for high-stakes issues before trial if they lose those motions in the lower courts and can convince an appellate court that there are unresolved legal issues to consider.

Kim Wehle, a law professor at the University of Baltimore, has speculated that appellate courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States, may make an exception in this case despite their usual reluctance to hear interlocutory appeals.

“To go to trial, if there is immunity or some other threshold basis to not go to trial, would damage the presidency itself,” Wehle told The Messenger. “Practically speaking, they’re not going to put the country through a trial when there is a valid immunity defense from the threshold, from the get-go.”

Left-Wing Criticism Of ‘Trump’ Judge Cannon Rises After Rulings Against Jack Smith
Jon Dougherty, November 6, 2023

Left-leaning attorneys and former federal prosecutors have ramped up their criticism of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon following a series of rulings unfavorable to special counsel Jack Smith in former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case.

According to a report by left-wing Raw Story, “Cannon reprimanded federal prosecutors for flagging that there is an ongoing battle for scheduling between the Florida case and the other federal case in Washington, D.C.” The outlet further claimed: “But when doing so, she cited the wrong rule relating to something completely different. It has drawn mockery and further questions about Cannon being in over her head in one of the most important cases in the United States.”

Andrew Weissman, the lead prosecutor on a team led by special counsel Robert Mueller in a pointless investigation into “Trump-Russia collusion,” wrote on the X platform: “We routinely advised the two judges who had the [Paul] Manafort criminal cases of filings made in the other case. That was an obligation we felt to both judges and a courtesy. Not once were we criticized for doing so. Cannon has to be removed, whether too novice, too partisan, or both.”

Former federal prosecutor-turned-senior legal consultant for the Los Angeles Times, Harry Litman, agreed but added that it doesn’t matter if Cannon is all-in for the president who nominated her, accusing her of being unable to handle the case.

“Biased or not, Cannon simply doesn’t have the game, and she masks it with prickly remonstrations of the government,” Litman wrote. “She needs to go back to judges’ school, except there isn’t such a place.”

In September, former Trump White House lawyer Stefan Passantino filed a defamation lawsuit against Weissmann, alleging he “publicly impugned his reputation when he claimed that Passantino coached his client, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, to lie in congressional testimony,” Bloomberg Law reported.

“This is an insidious lie,” Passantino argued in his lawsuit. “Mr. Passantino never coached Ms. Hutchinson to lie, nor did he attempt to shape her testimony in any way.”

The outlet noted further:

In April, Passantino sued the House Jan. 6 committee on similar grounds. Both complaints revolve around Passantino’s claims that committee members, and now Weissmann, spread falsehoods by stating that he coached star witness Hutchinson to lie to the panel.

Hutchinson told the House committee that Passantino advised her to claim she did not recall the details of an episode in which former President Donald Trump was said to have lashed out at members of his security detail in an SUV on the day of the Jan. 6 riot.

The law firm of Michael Best & Friedrich dismissed Passantino not long after her testimony became public. And earlier this year, a left-wing group called Lawyers Defending Democracy filed a motion with the Washington, D.C. Bar Association seeking to have Passantino’s license suspended.

Passantino’s lawsuit says Weissmann defamed him because of a “partisan animus” while also committing an “injurious falsehood” against him. He wants a jury to award him an amount that exceeds $75,000, Bloomberg Law reported.

Last week, Cannon agreed to push back the May 2024 start date for Trump’s classified documents trial.

Investigative reporter Julie Kelly, who has been covering all of the pre-trial hearings in Miami, posted on X, “As expected, Judge Cannon will delay the trial schedule in Jack Smith’s classified documents case against Trump.”

On Friday, she posted from the court, stating that “pre-trial deadlines temporarily stayed pending order to follow.”

Kelly indicated on Wednesday that Cannon was leaning toward delaying the trial date.

“Just left classified docs case hearing in Judge Cannon courtroom,” she wrote. “She will consider a modified trial schedule given numerous issues including voluminous discovery, discovery delays, late delivery of secure location to review evidence and Trump’s conflicting trial schedules.”

Donald Trump in court in Florida for hearing in classified documents case
3 hours ago
By Sam Cabral
BBC News

Donald Trump is in court in Florida as a judge prepares to consider whether to delay his trial for alleged mishandling of classified documents.

Originally scheduled to start in May, the trial has been held up by a legal battle over what evidence Mr Trump's legal team will be able to review.

Prosecutors are pushing for a 8 July start, while Mr Trump instead wants a date after the election, or in August.

Mr Trump has pleaded not guilty to 40 felony charges in the federal case.

He is accused of retaining sensitive national security files at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after leaving office in January 2021 and then obstructing repeated government efforts to get them back.

Indicted alongside him on related charges are his personal aide Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos de Oliveira.
Mr Trump, who is expected to unofficially clinch the Republican nomination for president later this month, has painted the four criminal cases he faces this year as a politically motivated "witch hunt" brought by Democrats to hurt his re-election prospects.

He has fought, with some success, to delay each case against him - although his first trial, over allegations related to money he paid adult film actress Stormy Daniels, is due to kick off later this month.

On Thursday, his lawyers in this Florida case said in a court filing: "As the leading candidate in the 2024 election, President Trump strongly asserts that a fair trial cannot be conducted this year in a manner consistent with the Constitution."

A trial that takes place before the election would interfere with Mr Trump's "Sixth Amendment right to be present and to participate in these proceedings" as well as the "First Amendment right that he shares with the American people to engage in campaign speech", they claimed.

Prosecutors say Mr Trump illegally held onto classified files at his Mar-a-Lago, Florida estate

Some legal experts have accused Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, of slow-walking the pre-trial process, including by postponing key deadlines.

In November, she hinted at a delay in the original schedule, citing a Trump team complaint about the time it would need to review what she called the "unusually high volume of unclassified and classified discovery" in the case.

That material includes 1.3 million pages of unclassified documents, 5,500 pages of classified documents and 60 terabytes of closed-circuit television footage, she said.

But Judge Cannon sided with prosecutors in two key rulings earlier this week regarding what evidence may be presented.
On Wednesday, she rejected Mr Trump's request to see more of the classified government filings than it already has access to. And the previous day she ruled that Mr Nauta and Mr de Oliveira did not require access to any of the classified discovery submitted by Special Counsel Jack Smith's team of prosecutors.

The judge's decision to reschedule the trial date will be key in shaping the timeline of Mr Trump's other court dates.

His trial in New York related to hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels begins on 25 March and is expected to last six weeks. His federal case in Washington on election interference charges, also brought by the special counsel's office, is on hold as the US Supreme Court rules on Mr Trump's claim that he should be immune from prosecution. A trial in Georgia on similar charges awaits a court date.