(CN) — Donald Trump will face trial in May, a federal judge ruled Friday, on allegations he mishandled classified documents after leaving the White House.
The order from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon sets Trump's trial to start on May 20, deep in the throes of the 2024 presidential primaries in which Trump has for months been the frontrunner for the Republican nomination.
Though she did not opt to delay Trump's trial until after the election, Cannon said it would be unreasonable to go along with the December start date proposed by prosecutors.
The Trump-appointed judge called the Department of Justice's timeline "atypically accelerated and inconsistent with ensuring a fair trial."
She pointed to the mountains of evidence already disclosed in the case, as well as the complicated procedures for handling confidential materials, as reasons for rejecting the government's fast-tracked schedule.
"By conservative estimates, the amount of discovery in this case is voluminous and likely to increase in the normal course as trial approaches," Cannon wrote.
While past presidents have faced legal woes, none have appeared before a jury facing charges. It would be a monumental stress test for the American legal system as prosecutors try to achieve justice in a rancorous political climate.
Earlier in 2024, Trump is set to go to trial on state criminal charges in New York related to his former lawyer's payment of hush money ahead of the 2016 election.
A third indictment may be imminent meanwhile after Trump revealed just this week that he received a target notice from the Justice Department stemming from the special counsel’s investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel, Jack Smith, to steer the federal cases against Trump through the political morass, but the former president and his allies have nonetheless derided the investigations as a Democrat-led plot to hamstring the likely Republican candidate.
In addition to his potential criminal exposure, Trump will potentially face two civil trials before the 2024 presidential election. The first is a civil fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James. The second is a defamation suit in New York federal court from E. Jean Carroll, the writer who already won a multimillion civil verdict against Trump after a jury found in May that Trump had sexually abused her in the 1990s.
Michael Johnston, a political science professor at Colgate University in New York, noted in an interview that, while a former president’s trial may be unique in U.S. politics, it's not unheard of in other countries.
Former French Presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy were both indicted and convicted as a result of unrelated corruption probes dating back to the 2000s. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been on trial since 2020 on charges related to three separate corruption scandals.
“Other democracies are perhaps not as awestruck by their own heads of state or heads of government as we are,” Johnston said in an email. “One lesson we might learn is that a strong democracy can definitely survive such a crisis and might even emerge stronger for having shown that no one is above the law.”
The U.S. has endured major political crises, such as Watergate and the Red Scare, and the basic institutions of government survived, the professor added.
“There's no easy guarantee that such will be the case as the legal system deals with the Trump era, but so far the news is more good than bad on that score,” Johnson said.
In the Miami case over which Judge Cannon is presiding, Trump faces 37 criminal counts, the bulk of which fall under the Espionage Act. The federal indictment unsealed in June accuses Trump of leaving the White House in 2021 with “scores of boxes” containing classified documents, then storing them in his Florida resort, Mar-A-Lago.
Prosecutors say the secret documents, some of which detailed the vulnerabilities of the U.S. and its allies to attack, were leeft in unguarded rooms, including a bathroom and Trump’s bedroom, as tens of thousands of members and guests streamed through the resort.
Trump allegedly showed documents to others on at least two occasions. In July 2021, Trump acknowledged in a recorded conversation with a writer, publisher and two members of his staff he knew he was sharing a classified document with them.
Walt Nauta, a former U.S. navy service member and Trump’s aide, was indicted with his boss on allegations he knew the boxes contained confidential information.
Both men have pleaded not guilty.
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