Judge Aileen Cannon has scheduled the start of the trial against Donald Trump for the documents found in his Mar-a-Lago residence starting from May 20, 2024. The decision came after last Tuesday’s hearing. The special prosecutor’s staff wanted to start the trial in December, Trump’s lawyers pressed for it to be set after the November elections. The judge rejected both sides’ arguments. The date is therefore fixed but it is not said that it will resist, further delays could occur since, as Cannon herself explained, the “case is complex”. The amount of documents to be viewed and the process of giving the necessary permissions for lawyers to access classified documents takes time. It’s about viewing a million unclassified documents; 9 months of video taken from surveillance cameras; 1500 pages of top-secret classified papers. In addition, there is other material that will need to be viewed.
The trial venue will be Fort Pierce, about a two-hour drive north of Miami and the jury, noted the Washington Post, will be made up of people from electoral districts won by Trump in both 2016 and 2020.
The Republican primaries should be over by May. In 2016, the last rival to raise the white flag was Ted Cruz. The Republican Senator from Texas conceded victory to Donald on May 3. The calendar of the GOP primaries in 2024 is not yet definitive, but by mid-March many states will have expressed themselves and the game as a tradition could already be clearly oriented.
The last primaries that arrived in late spring before expressing a certain verdict were the Democratic ones of 2008, the tug of war between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, then winner, was resolved in the first week of June with the concession of the former first lady.
The major trial takes place two months in advance of the GOP Convention which will take place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin between July 15 and 18 and which will crown the presidential candidate.
To date Donald Trump is the big favorite, the latest Ipsos / Reuters poll released on Wednesday gives him 47% of the votes. The most accredited rival is DeSantis, second but separated by 28 points.
In the case of the documents stolen from the White House and kept in Mar-a-Lago, Trump is accused of 38 counts together with his collaborator Waltine Torre Nauta. They are divided into seven categories, the former president is indicted under the Espionage Act.
Several judicial proceedings hang over Trump’s head. On Sunday the tycoon announced that he had received a “target letter”, in practice the notice of being under investigation, for the January 6 assault and for attempts to have altered the outcome of the 2020 elections. An indictment is expected which will shed light on what the charges are. It could arrive as early as the next few days as the grand jury heard from other witnesses on Thursday. According to jurists, that of January 6 is the most delicate case for Trump, far superior to the potential consequences of Mar-a-Lago. The sword of Damocles is in fact the accusation of conspiracy and attack on democratic rules (ie the attempt to prevent the transfer of power).
Then there is the issue of Georgia, or rather the pressure that Donald and his acolytes have made to change the certification of the outcome of the vote. An indictment is expected later this summer.
The Washington Post reported that the line between electoral campaign and legal battle is now blurred and that Trump has now mixed the themes in the rallies and in the composition of his personal agenda. Even in terms of money there is an unusual continuity. Between March and June Trump raised 35 million dollars, but only half ended up in the coffers of the electoral campaign, the others instead were diverted to a Super Pac which is also used to pay legal costs of Donald and his allies involved in the events of 2020 at every level. A Super Pac is a political action group that can raise and spend unlimited funds from companies, labor unions, individuals, and charities for campaigning purposes.