Prosecutors and Trump Lawyers Clash Over Timing in Classified Documents Case

The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case expressed skepticism on Tuesday about the government’s request to go to trial as early as December, but she also seemed disinclined to accede immediately to Mr. Trump’s desire to have the trial put off until after the 2024 election.

Appearing for the first time at a hearing in the case, the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, came to no decision about when to schedule the trial, saying she would issue a written order “promptly.”

The question of the trial’s timing could be hugely consequential, given that the legal proceeding is intertwined with the calendar of a presidential campaign in which Mr. Trump is now the front-runner for the Republican nomination.

For nearly two hours in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee, peppered prosecutors and the former president’s lawyers with questions that suggested she was in command of her courtroom and well-versed in the facts of the case.

Her decision about when to schedule the trial will be an early test for the judge, who came under widespread criticism last year after she rendered some decisions in a related case that were favorable to Mr. Trump at an early stage of the investigation.

At one point, Judge Cannon directly asked one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Christopher Kise, if he wanted to put off the trial until after the election. When Mr. Kise said he did, Judge Cannon told him that she wanted to focus on near-term issues like the amount of discovery evidence the defense had to review and the types of motions the lawyers planned to file.

As the hearing came to end, Todd Blanche, another one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, asked Judge Cannon if the defense could return to court in November and reassess the trial schedule then. Appearing to pick up on the judge’s desire to create what she called “a road map” for the case, Mr. Blanche said that if a trial date absolutely had to be chosen, he would ask for one in mid-November 2024, after the election.

Timing is particularly important in this case because if the trial is delayed until after votes are cast and Mr. Trump wins the race, he could try to pardon himself or have his attorney general dismiss the matter entirely.

The hearing in Fort Pierce, two and a half hours north of Miami, came a little more than a month after the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, filed an indictment against Mr. Trump accusing him of holding on to 31 individual classified documents after he left office in violation of the Espionage Act.

Mr. Trump has also been charged with a co-defendant, Walt Nauta, one of his personal aides, of a conspiracy to obstruct the government’s repeated efforts to reclaim the documents.

While Mr. Nauta was in court on Tuesday with his lawyer, Stanley Woodward Jr., Mr. Trump was not. Still, he was the main subject of discussion as the two sides in the case went beyond the question of the trial’s schedule and engaged in an almost philosophical debate about the inherent tensions of putting on trial a former president who was running to reclaim the White House.

David Harbach, one of Mr. Smith’s top deputies, told Judge Cannon that the rule of law should be applied to Mr. Trump as it would be to any criminal defendant.

“Mr. Trump is not the president,” Mr. Harbach said. “He is a private citizen who has been lawfully indicted by a grand jury in this district and his case should be guided by the federal code and the rules of this court like anyone else.”

But Mr. Blanche disagreed, arguing that it was not appropriate for Judge Cannon to “ignore” that Mr. Trump was running for office.

“It is intellectually dishonest to stand up in front of this court and say this case is like any other,” Mr. Blanche said. “It is not.”

Moments later, adding to those remarks, Mr. Kise sought to frame the classified documents prosecution as something like the legal version of the political contest between Mr. Trump and President Biden. He added — with rhetorical exaggeration — that the “two candidates were squaring off in this courtroom.”

That assessment seemed to offend Mr. Harbach, who pointed out that Attorney General Merrick B. Garland had appointed Mr. Smith as special counsel specifically to avoid the “specter of political influence” and that the case was being handled by career prosecutors who were not biased by politics.

“The government says that claim is flat-out false,” Mr. Harbach said in response to Mr. Kise’s assertion.

The hearing on Tuesday was initially put on the calendar to discuss issues related to the handling of classified materials in the case under a law known as the Classified Information Procedures Act. But most of the questions regarding classified documents were either relegated to the background of the proceeding or couched in terms of how they might affect the trial schedule, a matter that was clearly in the front of Judge Cannon’s mind.

The hearing opened with Judge Cannon pressing the government on why it believed the case could go to trial this winter when the discovery evidence was voluminous, the defense’s legal motions were potentially expansive and the issues involving classified materials exceedingly complex.

Jay Bratt, one of the prosecutors, admitted that the government had laid out an “aggressive schedule” for the case but told Judge Cannon that he and his team were “committed to doing the work to achieve it.”

Both Mr. Bratt and Mr. Harbach seemed concerned when the judge raised the possibility of declaring the case “complex”— a designation that could considerably slow its pace. Mr. Trump’s lawyers quickly seized that opportunity, saying they wanted a complex-case designation even if they had not formally made the request in court papers field before the hearing.

There was a final squabble over whether Mr. Trump could have a fair jury seated to hear his trial while he was running for office.

Mr. Kise noted that the publicity surrounding the case was inherently prejudicial to Mr. Trump and that the trial should be delayed until after the election when, as he put it, “the threat abates.”

But Mr. Harbach, noting “the divisions of opinion in our country over Mr. Trump,” argued there was no reason to believe that the media furor would be any less once the election had passed.

“The publicity surrounding Mr. Trump is chronic and in some sense permanent,” he said.