Donald Trump‘s attorney Alina Habba praised U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon for postponing the former president’s classified documents case indefinitely, saying she likes it when judges do “the right thing.”
Judge Cannon is overseeing Mr. Trump’s case in Florida, where special counsel Jack Smith has charged him with dozens of felony counts for keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. The former president has pleaded not guilty.
“Obviously our team is strong there and they’re looking at this closely,” Ms. Habba, the Trump lawyer, said on Fox News Wednesday. “And Judge Cannon said, ‘Hold on. We’ve got a lot of other things to do before you even try and pressure me like you pressure many other judges into having these rush trials before the November election.’”
“I like to see when a judge does the right thing,” the lawyer added.
Judge Cannon on Tuesday canceled the May 20 trial date and postponed it indefinitely. The decision comes as the judge deals with many pretrial issues.
“The Court also determines that finalization of a trial date at this juncture — before resolution of the myriad and interconnected pretrial and [Classified Information Procedures Act] issues remaining and forthcoming — would be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pretrial motions before the Court, critical CIPA issues, and additional pretrial and trial preparations necessary to present this case to a jury,” she wrote in the filing.
Trump attorneys allege that Mr. Smith’s team “failed to maintain the integrity of the contents of certain boxes obtained at Mar-a-Lago.”
In a motion, Mr. Smith admitted that “there are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.”
In a footnote, he added that “the government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what government counsel previously understood and represented to the court.”
Ms. Habba railed against Mr. Smith for the issue with the boxes.
“Let’s not forget what just came out here — we have found out that Jack Smith has his hand in the cookie jar,” she said. “He was intentionally taking evidence, not telling the court that he had basically taken classified document covers, put them on the wrong documents because they were sloppy.
“And then what they did was put it in a footnote. … When you put it in a footnote as a lawyer, that’s, ‘Hey, I don’t really want to highlight this, but it’s in a footnote’ and the people read it, we caught on.”
She said judges “taking up issues that need to be taken up [is the] kind of law and order that we need to see more of in this country.”
Mr. Trump faces four criminal cases as he continues in the race to have a second term in the White House.