The federal judge who was selected by Donald Trump to oversee the catastrophe involving his Mar-a-Lago confidential materials appears to have pushed the case on warp speed by scheduling a trial for just two months from now, which is a turn of events that is puzzling. The documents of the federal court that were made public on Monday morning revealed that the U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon had established what is referred to as a “rocket docket” in order to expedite the process of his trial.
Cannon has issued an order declaring that the most historically significant criminal trial in the history of the United States would begin on August 14. That’s just 55 days away, yet the majority of federal cases can take up to a year or longer as both parties prepare for a monumental battle in court. Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel Jack Smith at the Department of Justice, was unable to clarify whether or not this ruling was correct and whether or not it was just a typo. The attorneys representing Trump did not immediately react to questions that were posed.
Scholars in the field of law have observed that this judge appears to be something of a loose cannon because she renders rulings that are consistently perplexing and lean heavily in favor of the president who selected her during the closing months of his term in office. When she previously controlled another case, which was Trump’s legal challenge to the original search of his south Florida oceanside resort Mar-a-Lago, she inserted herself on dubious authority to stall the FBI investigation with red tape. This case was Trump’s legal challenge to the initial search of his property.
After reviewing her extremely brief history on the bench so far, it was recently determined by The New York Times that she has only spent a total of 14 days presiding over the proceedings of four criminal trials. This level of inexperience is mind-boggling for someone who is about to preside over such a significant trial that will set a long-lasting precedent on the nation’s democracy. The presence of the second-most important witness in Donald Trump’s trial was conspicuously absent from his arraignment. According to the order that she filed on Monday morning, federal prosecutors and lawyers representing Trump’s defense team are required to submit motions in the month of July and appear in her satellite courthouse in Fort Pierce, Florida, on August 8.
A person has the right to a quick trial, which is guaranteed by the United States Constitution. This right was established as a safeguard against the possibility that a person could be imprisoned indefinitely due to bureaucratic red tape. In actual fact, defense attorneys prefer to spend several months analyzing papers in order to poke holes in a case and hunt for exculpatory evidence that would either invalidate a prosecutor’s theory of the crime or raise reasonable doubt that it ever happened. In other words, they try to find a way to throw reasonable doubt on the possibility that the crime ever occurred. In the meantime, the prosecutor will use this time to conduct extra research and locate other witnesses. But by scheduling a trial in just two months’ time, Judge Cannon looks to be doing Trump a favor. He is starting the final legal struggle early enough that it will not impede Trump’s quest for president in 2024, which is likely to pick up steam by the end of this year.
