The trial against Donald Trump for seven crimes and a total of 37 charges for the concealment and retention of the hundreds of classified documents that he took from the White House, to his residence in Mar-a-Lago, was scheduled yesterday for May 20, 2024, in the middle of the electoral process towards the presidential elections of November of that year.
The judge in the case, Aileen Cannon, chosen for the position by the former president himself, presented the schedule of the judicial procedure yesterday, three days after the defense requested in a hearing that the hearing be held after the presidential elections of November 2024.
The Prosecutor’s Office, for its part, had proposed that the trial begin in December of this year. The chosen date is therefore halfway between the requests of the parties.
If the accusation were maintained, the trial would undoubtedly mark the presidential campaign, perhaps together with the process against the ultra leader for the assault on the Capitol and other attempts to reverse the results of the 2020 elections: a matter for which Trump could be charged in the coming days, since special prosecutor Jack Smith sent him the letter a few days ago indicating that he is under investigation. The charges on this occasion would be three, according to leaks published in different local media: conspiracy to defraud the United States, deprivation of the right to vote and tampering with a witness.
The date set for the hearing in the case of the secret papers is after most of the primaries for the election of the Republican candidate for the presidential elections: except in half a dozen states, such primaries will take place between January 15 and May 14.
According to Judge Cannon’s resolution, the trial in the case of the classified documents must be held in Fort Pierce, a Florida coastal city just over 200 kilometers north of Miami, a favorable territory for Trump, with a jury made up of citizens of counties where he won the previous two presidential elections.
It is a sung that the former president’s defense will do everything possible to delay the trial to, as he proposed in his initial request, postpone it until after the elections. Judge Cannon laid the foundation for that claim by indicating at her hearing last Wednesday that it is a “complex” case.
The summary refers to the appropriation, illicit transfer, concealment and retention of the hundreds of documents that, classified with marks of “top secret”, “secret” or “confidential”, Trump illegally took from the White House to his residence in Florida after losing the elections against Joe Biden in November 2020.
For those facts, the prosecutor accuses the former president of conspiracy to obstruct justice, witness tampering, false statements and deliberate retention of secret documents in violation of the Espionage Law.
Of the long half dozen criminal and civil cases that the ex-president faces due to his political and business decisions, five already have a trial date: before the matter of the secret papers in May 2020 –if not later–, next October there will be a lawsuit for fraud against the real estate emporium called the Trump Organization; on January 15, a second civil trial for defamation will take place against the writer Jean Carroll, who last month won her a first lawsuit for that infraction and for sexual abuse with compensation of 5 million dollars; on January 29, she will be tried, along with three of her children, for fraud to attract investors; and a hearing is scheduled for March on 34 counts of forgery in the payment of a bribe to the porn star Stormy Daniels. A whole ordeal that Trump will try to turn into a string of complaints of political persecution.
Will the Republican Party continue to support him and accuse Joe Biden of instrumentalizing justice? Although it is hard to believe, nothing indicates for now that this support is going to cease.
