Legal Experts Say DOJ’s Case Against Trump Won’t Be ‘Speedy’
Although former President Donald Trump was arraigned Tuesday and prosecutors promised a “speedy trial,” some analysts have said that it’s likely not going to be the case.
Special counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump with over three dozen charges in connection to whether he allegedly mishandled classified records. Smith, in a statement last week, said that he will opt to have a “speedy trial” for Trump, but former prosecutors have said that such cases are usually drawn-out.
Smith’s comment is “just wishful thinking,” high-powered Washington attorney Mark Zaid told Reuters. “The reality is the Trump team will be controlling much of the timing of the litigation.”
Espionage Act cases like Trump’s are especially complex because some of the key evidence presented during a public trial is classified. As such, prosecutors need to balance two seemingly competing forces: The need to protect the nation’s closely held secrets while still ensuring that Trump is afforded due process by having access to the evidence to help him prepare a defense.
“In every case that I had involving classified information, we never had a speedy trial,” Stephanie Siegmann, a former chief of the national security unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston, told Reuters. Siegmann said that the evidence-sharing process with Trump’s defense team could take about a year.
“This case will be designated complex because it involves classified information,” Siegmann, now a partner with the law firm Hinkley Allen, told the outlet.
Deciding how classified evidence is shared, both to the defense team and to the jury, can get contentious and may lead to legal battles that will play out largely behind the scenes under seal. At times, some of those hearings by law must be conducted ex-parte, meaning Trump’s own lawyers cannot be present.
Moreover, in Espionage Act cases, decisions on pre-trial motions related to classified evidence can be appealed—an extra step that is not usually allowed in most routine criminal cases. If for example, prosecutors seek to shield records that reveal battle plans or nuclear weapons secrets, Trump’s team could agree it should be protected, or they could fight to make it public.
“Some defense teams would agree that that information has to be protected,” said David Aaron, a veteran former Justice Department prosecutor now with Perkins Coie, a law firm that was retained by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and was accused of paying a third-party to come up with a now-discredited dossier targeting Trump.
“But a defense team has every right to contest the idea of even protecting that at trial … they could go ahead and challenge every single argument the government makes,” Aaron told Reuters.
One compounding factor in the case is the judge. Early reports indicated that U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was nominated by Trump, is overseeing the case.
“There are few things more powerful than a district judge in a federal case,” Alan Rozenshtein, a former attorney in the DOJ National Security Division who is a law professor at the University of Minnesota, told CNN. Cannon “could—if she wanted to—cause huge problems for the prosecution. Would they be existential problems? Probably not.”
During a courtroom appearance on Tuesday, Trump pleaded not guilty to the 37 charges against him. Prosecutors, in an indictment unsealed late last week, alleged Trump illegally retained national defense information and concealed documents.
In multiple posts online and during a Miami stop, Trump proclaimed his innocence and said the Department of Justice is targeting him for politically motivated purposes. Later on Tuesday night, the former president released a televised statement and said that some of those records were going to be used for his presidential library.
“Today we witnessed the most evil and heinous abuse of power in the history of our country. Very sad thing to watch,” Trump said in a speech. “It’s a political persecution like something straight out of a fascist or communist nation,” he added.
The former president said that he had the right to take those classified documents under the Presidential Records Act. “I had every right to have these documents,” Trump said.
Reuters contributed to this report.
