Donald Trump rails as court orders jury trial
Donald Trump unleashed on the Department of Justice’s ‘Hunter Biden scam’ as a federal court ordered the ex-president face Espionage Act charges during presidential debates.
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Donald Trump railed against the Department of Justice after a federal court set his jury trial date during presidential primary debates while Hunter Biden received “a mere traffic ticket” for illegal gun possession and tax crimes.
A Florida judge set the initial hearing on Trump’s 37 counts of allegedly violating the Espionage Act and obstructing justice to start on August 14, just a week and a half ahead of the first Republican debate.
The trial under Judge Aileen Cannon in Fort Pierce, Florida, is scheduled for two weeks and would likely overlap with the GOP candidate debate scheduled to take place in the US state of Wisconsin on August 23.
“Wow! The corrupt Biden DOJ just cleared up hundreds of years of criminal liability by giving Hunter Biden a mere ‘traffic ticket’. Our system is BROKEN!” Trump said on Truth Social.
“People are going wild over the Hunter Biden Scam with the DOJ!”
Biden, the 53-year-old son of US President Joe Biden, pleaded guilty to wilful failure to pay federal income tax and possessing a firearm despite being a drug user.
The trial date for Trump came just hours after the former president told Fox News he didn’t hand over the boxes of files because he was “very busy” and that he had “zero” concerns about being convicted, “based on the law”.
Trump pleaded not guilty to charges related to the alleged mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida.
Judge Cannon ruled that pre-trial motions be filed by July 24. Trump’s legal defence team, meanwhile, is expected to try delaying the start of the trial with a flurry of motions and challenges. They will also need time to obtain security clearances needed to access the classified material Trump is accused of hoarding.
Special counsel Jack Smith received approval from a federal magistrate to prevent Trump and his lawyers from releasing sensitive information from the case to the public.
The trial date came just hours after Trump told Fox host Bret Baier that he didn’t immediately hand over classified materials to the National Archives and Records Administration because wanted to first go through the boxes and get all of his “personal things out”.
“I don’t want to hand that over to NARA yet,” Trump said. “And I was very busy, as you’ve sort of seen.”
When Baier noted that the indictment alleged the documents were moved between locations by an aide, Trump maintained he wanted to “take all of my things out” before sending the boxes over.
“These boxes were interspersed with all sorts of things — golf shirts, clothing, pants, shoes, there were many things,” he said.
Key to the felony indictment was an alleged audio recording of Trump from the summer of 2021 in which he was said to have discussed a secret document from the Pentagon about attacking Iran.
According to transcripts of the call, Trump was alleged to have said the plan to attack Iran was “highly confidential” and that “as president, I could have declassified it” but that he can’t because it was “still a secret”.
Trump however denied in his Fox News interview that such a document existed, adding that he had lots of paper including “copies of newspaper articles” and “magazines”.
“I didn’t show papers, just the opposite. When I said I couldn’t declassify it that’s because I wasn’t president, I’ve never made any bones about that. When I’m not president, I can’t declassify,” he added.
“There was no document. That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things. And it may have been held up or it may not but that was not a document. I did not have a document per se. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles”.
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