The federal judge who threw out former President Trump’s classified documents case will preside over the case involving the second assassination attempt on Trump in West Palm Beach, Fla.
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Former President Trump is seeking $100 million in damages from the U.S. Justice Department over its handling of the classified documents search at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida.
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District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan will face challenges getting a Trump case that’s unlikely to proceed to trial before the election — or possibly ever — back on track.
After former President Donald Trump’s presidential immunity appeal brought on a months-long delay in the election interference case prosecuted by special counsel Jack Smith, the case finally returned to Chutkan on Friday. Though she wasted no time scheduling a hearing for August 16 and asking both parties to submit a schedule for pretrial proceedings by August 9, legal experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that efforts to advance the case will meet continued challenges.
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Following humiliating losses at the Supreme Court and the shocking dismissal of the so-called classified documents case in Florida, Special Counsel Jack Smith appeared down for the count in his floundering attempt to ever get Donald Trump behind bars, let alone before Election Day.
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A seismic shift has occurred in the 2024 presidential race as the Democrats’ rhetoric, debate performance, and persistent lawfare against former President Donald Trump have appeared to backfire on them, with support for him continuing to increase, including after the assassination attempt.
Trump has been called a “threat to democracy” by Democrats, charged with numerous felony counts in federal and state cases, debated President Joe Biden with CNN moderators, and survived an assassination attempt, all of which have appeared to backfire on Democrats in the presidential race and increase the former president’s popularity as he runs to return to the White House.
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After surviving an assassination attempt over the weekend, Trump began the week with good news in the form of Judge Aileen Cannon dismissing special counsel Jack Smith’s Mar-a-Lago case against him in a seismic ruling that could spell the end of his federal legal woes and build on his existing momentum in the national spotlight.
Smith had charged Trump in connection with his storage and retention of materials at his Mar-a-Lago estate, which the FBI raided in August of 2022. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith in late 2022 to pursue the case and he brought an initial indictment in 2023. Trump pleaded not guilty though Smith in July of that year brought a superseding indictment with additional charges. The former president has long maintained he was innocent of any wrongdoing and that the case was part of a broader political witch hunt designed to derail his 2024 bid for the White House.
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“I’m going to ask that you just calm down. I understand this is sensitive and it’s difficult, but these questions are briefed and they’re before the Court.”
So said Judge Aileen Cannon to David Harbach, one of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s lead prosecutors in the government’s espionage and obstruction case against former president Donald Trump, during a hearing on Wednesday. While temperatures spiked outside the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce, Florida throughout the day, so too did the climate inside Cannon’s courtroom.
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U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon may have just indefinitely postponed Donald Trump’s espionage and obstruction trial but that doesn’t mean her federal courtroom in Fort Pierce, Florida will lie dormant over the next few months.
In officially vacating the existing May 20 trial date—an impossibility considering the defendant will be in a Manhattan courtroom for the foreseeable future—Cannon declined to set another date, calling it “imprudent” at this stage of the process. She noted a “myriad” of unresolved matters in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s 42-count indictment against the former president and his two co-defendants, Mar-a-Lago employees Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Olivera, for willfully retaining national defense information and attempting to impede the government’s investigation.
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Top Biden administration officials worked with the National Archives to develop Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against Donald Trump involving the former president’s alleged mishandling of classified material, according to recently unsealed court documents in the case pending in southern Florida.
More than 300 pages of newly unredacted exhibits, containing emails and other correspondence related to the early stages of the hunt for presidential papers, challenge public statements by Joe Biden about what he knew and when he knew it regarding the case against his political rival.
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Former President Donald Trump called for special counsel Jack Smith to be sanctioned or censured for “attacking” the judge in Trump’s classified documents case.
Trump’s comments on Thursday come after Smith and his team of prosecutors made it clear they think Judge Aileen Cannon’s latest ruling was based on “an unstated and fundamentally flawed legal premise.” Prosecutors objected to Cannon’s order to produce proposed jury instructions under two different legal scenarios. Smith said both legal scenarios were flawed.
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Special Counsel Jack Smith asked Judge Aileen Cannon on Thursday to reconsider her decision to unseal certain documents prosecutors wanted to keep from the public docket.
Cannon, who is overseeing the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump in Florida, ruled Tuesday that certain discovery material Smith wanted to keep under seal because it could impact the safety of potential witnesses would be disclosed out of the “strong presumption of public access in criminal proceedings.” Smith urged Cannon to reconsider her decision, arguing that she “applied the wrong legal standard and issued orders that, in practice, will expose witnesses and others to intolerable and needless risks.”
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Throughout 2020, both Republicans and Democrats warned that the U.S. Supreme Court would ultimately determine the winner of the presidential election — albeit for different reasons.
Democrats feared a conservative majority would uphold what they called “voter suppression” laws to tighten voting requirements that might benefit President Trump. Republicans worried how the court would handle cases related to lax absentee voting measures enacted as a result of the coronavirus pandemic that gave Joe Biden a big advantage.
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As former President Donald Trump’s legal difficulties continue to stack up, scheduling conflicts and trial delays offer relief and highlight an emerging path for him to enter the 2024 election without a conviction, should he be the Republican nominee.
Facing the strain of four separate criminal indictments while running a presidential campaign, Trump has sought to postpone trials in his cases until after the election. At least two judges — the one overseeing his Florida classified documents case and another overseeing his New York case for allegedly falsifying business records — have signaled a willingness to delay, while Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis believes the Georgia trial may not conclude until early 2025.
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At one point during a contentious hearing in her Florida courtroom on Wednesday afternoon, U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon confronted the Department of Justice about its concurrent federal indictments against Donald Trump.
Cannon pressed Jay Bratt, the chief prosecutor on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents case, to name another instance when the government brought charges against the same defendant on two different matters within a few months of each other. (Smith indicted the former president last June in the southern district of Florida for unlawfully keeping national defense information at Mar-a-Lago and obstruction of justice. Seven weeks later, Smith charged Trump in the District of Columbia with four counts related to the events of January 6.)
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The federal judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case signaled that she would consider postponing the coming May trial, according to Politico.
Trump’s lawyers requested in early October that the trial be delayed until “at least mid-November 2024,” after the 2024 election, citing scheduling conflicts with other trials along with delays in record production by Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon did not issue a ruling during a Wednesday hearing but was skeptical that the original schedule could still be met, according to Politico.
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The criminal trial in federal prosecutors case regarding former President Trump’s retention of classified documents after leaving office is set to start May 20, 2024, a federal judge in Florida announced Friday.
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A federal judge ordered all the attorneys involved in former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case to move forward with the process to get security clearance.
U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon told all the attorneys to “complete all outstanding applicant tasks required to obtain the requisite security clearances in this matter” by July 13.
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A federal judge in Florida on Friday released a list of materials the FBI seized from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort that reportedly includes a mix of “top secret” documents, such personal items as photographs and other materials.
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A federal judge on Saturday indicated that she will likely grant former President Donald Trump’s request for a “special master” to oversee the FBI’s review of documents seized at his Mar-a-Lago home earlier this month.
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