The former president and his lawyers have previously asked that the trial be postponed until after the presidential election, while the government wanted it to start in December this year. Federal judge Aileen M. Cannon, who was appointed by Trump himself in 2020, has now gone for a place in between. This means that Trump will probably be convicted or acquitted in the document case before the presidential election takes place. Trump is still the Republicans’ favorite candidate. This means that a battle in court can collide in terms of time with the battle for the US’s top job. Crowds watch Trump speak at a conference in West Palm Beach on July 15. Photo: Lynne Sladky / AP Cannon told Trump’s lawyers on Wednesday that the presidential election campaign did not matter when she was going to set a start date, according to The Guardian. However, she also believed that six months was too short a time to prepare for, in a case where the evidence contains classified documents. Both Trump and support player Waltine “Walt” Nauta were charged last month in connection with 31 classified documents that were found at the former president’s address. In total, around 13,000 documents were stored in boxes at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, which were stacked in the bathroom, the bedroom, in an office and in a storage room. Also charged in the case is Walt Nauta, who is one of Trump’s employees. Photo: ALON SKUY / AFP The prosecution believes Trump was helped by Nauta to help him keep some of the documents, even though the authorities in the US had asked him to hand them back. They have denied criminal liability at each of their court hearings in Miami. According to the judge, the evidence consists of more than one million pages of unclassified material. This bathroom is one of the rooms where the FBI discovered documents inside Mar-a-Lago. Photo: US Justice Department / Reuters In addition, there will be nine months of footage from surveillance cameras and more than 1,500 pages of classified information. Both parties have said that they would not have time to be ready before what was supposed to be the start date, i.e. 14 August. Høgestøl – It will be exciting to see how Trump handles it, says lawyer and US expert Sofie Høgestøl to news. – Trump’s calendar has started to become very full of court cases. It is a stress test for American democracy when a branch of the government investigates someone who is trying to become president again. Trump has claimed several times on his own social media platform Truth Social that the criminal case is politically motivated. So far, his advisers have been open that he hopes a new presidential term will be the solution. Sofie Høgestøl is associate professor of jurisprudence at UiO. Photo: Geir Olsen / NTB – The Ministry of Justice in the USA interprets the US Constitution so that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. But that has not been clarified by the Supreme Court. – But in theory, and this is again the theory, the president of the United States has the power to pardon persons, and then also in theory perhaps himself. According to Høgestøl, the reason why the prosecution wanted to take the case in December is that the Ministry of Justice does not like to issue charges too close to an election. If they managed to do this, the matter would be finished before the primary election is properly underway. Now that will no longer be possible. – One gets the impression that the prosecution, i.e. the state attorney, is trying to treat Trump like any other defendant as far as possible. Happening in Cannon’s home district The court case is scheduled to take place in the port city of Fort Pierce, which lies north of Miami in Florida. This is the district where Cannon himself is a judge. It is the judge Aileen Cannon who has seen the start date for the document case in Florida. Photo: HANDOUT / AFP There has been much discussion about whether Cannon is the right judge to be in charge of Trump’s case, after she was randomly assigned to it in June. She was heavily criticized on several occasions last year, when she allowed a third party to review the FBI’s seizure of documents that were kept at Trump’s address. It was Trump himself who asked for this investigation, writes the Washington Post. The case was taken further to an appeals court, where it was unanimously decided that Cannon was wrong. But Høgestøl says that, according to American law, Cannon is competent to be responsible for the case, and that she has experience in criminal cases from a long period as a public prosecutor. – Judges in the USA are politically appointed at the federal level. It was Trump who nominated her, but then it was a bipartisan Judiciary Committee that approved her. – So it’s a bit more nuanced than it might seem. Slogans such as “stop the steal” were raised at a meeting between Trump supporters in Michigan on Wednesday. Photo: BILL PUGLIANO / AFP No indictment yet in the January 6 case A grand jury in Washington is still considering whether to indict Trump in connection with the storming of Congress on January 6, 2021. The reason was, among other things, that a defense attorney was delayed, writes The New York Times. Two days ago, Trump said on social media that he expected a new indictment, because he had been informed by special investigator Jack Smith that he was being investigated in the case. The trial in New York, which concerns hush money payments to former porn star Stormy Daniels, is expected to start in March 2024.
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Will probably happen before the presidential election next year – news Urix – Foreign news and documentaries
