The classified documents trial in Florida is officially scheduled to begin May 20, but Cannon is all but certain to postpone it. The question is how long it will be delayed. On Thursday evening, Smith urged her to set a new trial date of July 8, while Trump’s lawyers renewed their longstanding position that the trial should not occur until after the election.

“A lot of work needs to be done in the pretrial phase of this case,” Cannon said in court on Friday, with Trump looking on from the defense table.

The judge said prosecutors’ proposed timeline would compress a lot of pretrial arguments and deliberation into very short windows. “To try to do 13 motions in a day or even two days seems unrealistic,” said Cannon, a Trump nominee confirmed in the final months of his presidency.

A debate over timing, with politics lurking in background

The backdrop of the 2024 campaign is critical because, if Trump is elected and the trial is still pending, he could order the Justice Department to shut down the case. But Cannon took pains to avoid referencing the election. Even when she did allude to it, she did it obliquely, using a numerical citation to ask Smith’s team about a Justice Department regulation prohibiting certain investigative steps in close proximity to an election.

“That provision does not apply in a case that has already been charged,” responded Jay Bratt, one of the top prosecutors working for Smith.

Bratt added that the special counsel’s team had consulted with the Justice Department unit that handles most cases involving politicians and candidates, the Public Integrity Section. “It does not apply to setting a trial date.”

At one point, the judge seemed to take umbrage at what she viewed as a suggestion by Jay Bratt, one of the top prosecutors working for Smith, that she wasn’t moving quickly enough.

“I can assure you that, in the building, there’s a good deal of judicial work going on,” Cannon said.

Lawyers trade barbs

In some of the most pointed language of the hearing, Bratt criticized a fallback option that Trump’s lawyers proposed in their Thursday filing. If Cannon does not push the trial until after the election, Trump’s lawyers suggested, she could schedule it to begin in August. But Bratt said that proposal was just a subterfuge for the former president to seek further delays that would achieve his primary goal of preventing a trial before the election.

“What it really seems to me is that those were fake dates and really almost bad-faith dates,” Bratt said. “We just need to bring this case to trial this summer.”

One of Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche, argued that the former president could not receive a fair trial during the final stretch of the presidential campaign.

“The real question the special counsel hasn’t answered is whether they agree it would be complete election interference [to hold a trial] around the time of the election,” Blanche declared.

The judge seemed to agree with Trump’s lawyers that prosecutors were giving short shrift to Trump’s rights by suggesting that a variety of classified proceedings should take place during the time where his New York trial is expected to be underway. That trial is planned to run most weekdays except for Wednesdays, which will make it unreasonable for Trump and his counsel to race to Florida for one-day federal court sessions, Blanche said.

Bratt said the apparent scheduling conflict was essentially the fault of Trump’s lawyers for agreeing to defend him in both cases, but Cannon disagreed.

“It’s not just the choice of counsel. It’s the accused’s right to participate,” the judge told Bratt.

Judge may expand government’s duties to give defense evidence

Cannon also signaled that she sees some merit in the defense’s claims that other components of the federal government should be treated as parts of the prosecution team — a critical issue in determining how much evidence Trump and his two co-defendants are entitled to. Trump has claimed that large swaths of the federal government, from the National Archives to the intelligence community, should be considered part of Smith’s apparatus, a contention that the special counsel says is overly broad.

“It does appear to be narrower than potentially warranted,” the judge said near the conclusion of the morning session.

Cannon sounded inclined to grant the defendants a hearing on the parameters of Smith’s team, although she also appeared to be seeking ways to limit that courtroom exploration to a few agencies rather than the entire intelligence community and, perhaps, the White House.

Trump attended Friday’s hearing, as he has done in recent proceedings in several of his criminal cases, sitting ensconced between Blanche and Emil Bove, another member of his legal team. The former president occasionally whispered to them, but generally faced forward, looking at the lectern where the attorneys stood as they addressed the judge.

As the hearing broke for lunch, Trump briefly appeared miffed when security escorted Smith out of the courtroom before him, forcing him to wait for their exit.

Judge skeptical of blanket request for witness secrecy

During the afternoon session, lawyers wrangled over the prosecution’s requests to keep the names of witnesses and their statements off the public docket.

Trump and his co-defendants have filed motions containing information that the government turned over in discovery but deems sensitive, including the identities of government witnesses. The information has been sealed from the public.

Trump (along with a coalition of media organizations, including POLITICO) oppose the sealing, and Cannon recently ordered that the materials be unsealed. Smith’s team has urged her to reconsider that ruling and keep the information secret.

Cannon grilled prosecutor David Harbach about the prosecution’s assertion that the secrecy is needed because of threats and harassment that various Trump critics and other individuals have been subjected to, particularly after being singled out by the former president on social media.

“In the government’s view, this isn’t some hypothetical concern,” Harbach said. “It is a real concern — and they know it,” he said of the defense teams.

Cannon was withering in her criticism of a prosecution filing that asked for secrecy for not only witness identities, but also the substance of their statements. “Even at the most basic level, the showing was deficient,” the judge declared.

Harbach conceded prosecutors failed in that submission to detail all the legal reasoning supporting their position. “We recognize that we could have done a better job of that initially, and so we’re owning that,” he said.

Under questioning from the judge, Harbach acknowledged he had no examples of threats to witnesses in connection with the classified documents case. “It shouldn’t take someone having to get threatened or get injured,” he said.

The judge said some protection for witnesses might be appropriate, but she expressed concern that the broad categories prosecutors want to put off limits to the public — at least until trial — could shield much of the case. She also maintained that a certain degree of publicity was inevitable for witnesses in such a high-profile proceeding.

“I’m open to reasonable measures to protect witness safety. What I’m concerned about is the sort of blanket requests,” Cannon said.

Cannon’s concerns about the secrecy complicating hearings and even rulings in the case raised the possibility that prosecutors’ drive to keep to witness-related information under wraps could wind up setting back their efforts to get a trial started by July or August.

At the conclusion of the hearing, the judge thanked the lawyers but gave no indication of when she plans to rule either on the trial schedule or on the secrecy issue.

Gerstein and Duncan reported from Fort Pierce. Cheney reported from Washington.