President Donald Trump is using his midterm schedule to stall a hearing on Jack Smith’s classified documents report, a former U.S. attorney says.
Joyce Vance, who served as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, laid out the maneuver Tuesday in an article for her Substack newsletter Civil Discourse, arguing the president’s latest bid for a delay deserves a swift rejection.
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals recently moved oral argument up to November 2, one day before the midterm elections, in a case where two news organizations are seeking to intervene and push for the release of Volume II of Smith’s report, which covers the Mar-a-Lago classified documents prosecution. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon withheld the report on Inauguration Day and later rejected the outlets’ bid to join the case, and the Justice Department is now on Trump’s side.
Trump’s attorneys responded with an 11-page motion asking for a continuance.
“Given President Trump’s extensive commitments, including travel and other obligations in advance of the November 3, 2026, federal midterm elections, counsel will not have sufficient opportunity to meaningfully confer with her client while preparing for oral argument on the currently scheduled November 2, 2026, argument date,” the lawyers wrote.
Vance was unmoved.
“That’s just a big ‘So, what?’ here,” she wrote.
She noted the court’s local rules call such motions “generally disfavored,” and that Trump’s lawyers never spell out the conflicts facing attorneys for his former co-defendants Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira. Instead, she wrote, they “travel heavily on Trump’s schedule.”
That schedule, she argued, hardly backs up the claim.
“Given the president’s prolific social media usage, his time spent on the golf course, and his focus on vanity projects like building a ballroom and mucking up the Reflection Pool, one could forgive the Eleventh Circuit panel if they don’t take the claim he doesn’t have time for whatever sort of consultation with his lawyer he needs seriously,” Vance wrote.
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