The judge has granted Trump’s request to pause the deadline.
Attorneys for former President Donald Trump are seeking to push deadlines and file additional motions, including a possible request for sanctions, in the classified documents case prosecuted by special counsel Jack Smith after revelations that the order of files in the physical boxes of documents do not match the digital scans.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon allowed the defense to file the extra reply brief on May 6. Both sides have accused the other of mischaracterizing the situation to the judge as a May 9 deadline for the defense to file expert disclosures related to classified information litigation loomed overhead.
In a separate paperless order, Judge Cannon paused that deadline on May 6. “Order setting second set of pretrial deadlines/hearings to follow,” the docket reads.
On May 3, the prosecutors had made the admission that the files were not in the same order, and in a footnote admitted that they had made misrepresentations to the court about this issue.
“President Trump and counsel are deeply troubled to be learning of these facts approximately 11 months after the charges were filed in this case,” Trump attorneys wrote.
Who Handled Evidence?
Defense attorneys argued this revealed that prosecutors have since “day one” made “false assertions of compliance with their discovery obligations.”
The inconsistency had been confirmed by prosecutors after issues were flagged by attorneys for Walt Nauta, valet to President Trump, who was charged for obstruction alongside the former president as a codefendant.
Attorneys for President Trump argued they had not examined the boxes themselves when they had the scans, as it “never occurred to us, until last Friday, that the prosecution team could not be trusted to perform the basic task of maintaining the integrity of such evidence despite the expansive resources at their disposal.”
In addition to the documents not being in the same order with prosecutors unaware of the reason, prosecutors had acknowledged that the scans provided to the defense were made by an outside vendor as part of a related civil case. The defense argued that process “lacked the constitutional, statutory, and ethical safeguards that guide discovery obligations in this criminal case.”
After the May 3 revelation, President Trump’s legal team reached out to the prosecutors with a discovery letter requesting materials related to this issue.
