The judge overseeing former president Donald Trump's classified documents case on Wednesday signaled her intent to allow "reasonable adjustments" to his current trial schedule over concerns it might "collide" with other trials he's up against.
United States District Judge Aileen Cannon, an appointee of Trump, made the comments during a hearing Wednesday afternoon in Florida federal court, according to a New York Times reporter in the room.
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Trump is slated to head to his first criminal trial in Washington, D.C., on March 4 and in his Florida case on May 20. While Cannon did not say what alterations she intends to make to the schedule, she was skeptical that everything in the trial could be “accomplished in this compressed period of time.”
Trump's legal team has continuously voiced support for holding his criminal trials until after the 2024 election, though his crowded legal calendar could force some scheduling adjustments due to existing conflicts between his criminal and civil court cases. Another reporter at the hearing said Cannon was interested in entering an order on possible adjustments as soon as possible.
Earlier in the day, the pair of federal judges overseeing Trump's criminal trials issued contrasting orders over what classified materials his defense team can access during pretrial proceedings.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, an appointee of former President Barack Obama who is overseeing the case alleging Trump attempted to subvert the 2020 election, blocked him from seeing special counsel Jack Smith's evidence ahead of a March trial date, according to a written order.
Chutkan granted the government's motion to permit prosecutors to withhold "certain classified information" from Trump rather than allowing them to provide an "unclassified summary substitution for certain classified information."
Smith's team had pointed to the Classified Information Procedures Act and Rule (CIPA) in their motion requesting to withhold the information. Trump's legal team had pressed the judge in October to allow "attorneys'-eyes-only" access to the CIPA documents.
Although there is considerably less classified information involved in the election subversion case, the nature of the evidence being held from Trump's legal team remains unknown.
"It is not possible to isolate the unclassified portions of the CIPA § 4 Motion in such a way that its arguments could be meaningfully litigated," Chutkan said.
Just minutes before Chutkan's order, Cannon issued a similar order in the case alleging Trump obstructed the government's retrieval of classified documents from Mar-a-Lago, a case that does rely on a bulk of classified information as the government's evidence against him.
The government's position in the Florida case requested the use of a separate CIPA rule to more broadly limit Trump's defense team's access to classified documents.
But Cannon held that their argument to shield those records lacked "merit." Cannon said that federal prosecutors need to go through the "proper mechanism" to do so, even if the special counsel "meets its burden to restrict from Defendants whatever quantity of classified information it seeks to restrict."
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In essence, Chutkan's order allows Smith to summarize the classified information he plans to use in the 2020 elections case against Trump, while Cannon's order won't bar Trump's counsel from seeing the classified materials at issue in that case — for now.
Trump is facing four felony counts in the D.C. case, including allegedly conspiring to defraud the U.S. The former president is also facing 37 counts related to his post-presidency handling of classified documents. He has pleaded not guilty to all of the counts in both cases.