Former President Donald Trump is expected to attend a hearing Thursday in the federal criminal case involving his handling of classified documents in Florida, where his attorneys will argue the case should be thrown out.
Trump is not required to be at the hearing in Fort Pierce, but his lawyers indicated he and his two co-defendants would attend in a court filing Monday, where they asked for extra time to respond to some other outstanding motions in the case.
“The reasons for this request are that (1) the Defendants and counsel need to travel to Fort Pierce prior to March 14 in order to participate in the hearing, which is time we would otherwise use to prepare the other reply submissions; (2) President Trump and counsel need to spend time preparing for the oral argument, which is time we would otherwise use to prepare the other reply submissions,” the filing said.
They also said that the former president and his attorneys are preparing for the March 25 start date of his New York criminal trial “and the need to simultaneously devote attention to that case and this matter has been necessitated in part” by the “strategic scheduling demands of the Special Counsel’s Office.”
A short time after their Monday filing, Trump’s attorneys filed a separate one in New York, seeking to have the trial there delayed until Trump’s presidential immunity claims are decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Trump’s Florida filing did not mention the request he was making in New York, but a response from special counsel Jack Smith’s office later Monday cited the document in a filing to the Trump-appointed judge who’s presiding over the Florida case, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon.
Smith’s filing urged Cannon to deny Trump’s request for a delay, arguing it’s “mostly based on circumstances about which they have been aware” for a long period of time, including the New York trial date.
Cannon has said that Thursday’s hearing is expected to take all day.
Trump’s legal team and prosecutors…
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