The official start of the trial against former US president Donald Trump in the affair surrounding the retention of secret government documents has been postponed indefinitely.
The previously planned start of the trial on May 20 has been cancelled, the judge in charge, Aileen Cannon, announced in a letter on Tuesday. She said unresolved legal issues were behind the postponement.
It is therefore unlikely that the trial will begin before the US presidential election in November.
The decision is a success for the Republican candidate, as he is trying to delay the start of a possible trial as much as possible. The 77-year-old hopes to move back into the White House after the presidential election.
Trump is currently also on trial in a court in New York in connection with hush money payments to a porn actress. But this trial is not Trump's only legal problem.
Trump was hit with federal charges in the document affair last year. He is accused of unlawfully retaining highly sensitive information from his time as president between 2017 and 2021.
In August 2022, the FBI raided Trump's mansion in Florida and seized several sets of documents classified as top secret. Trump is also accused of conspiring to obstruct the investigation.
He is alleged to have tried to use associates to make footage from surveillance cameras disappear and to have boxes of documents taken away.
Trump pleaded not guilty when the charges were presented in Miami last year. His lawyers are still trying to avert the trial, invoking Trump's immunity as president. They argue that keeping the documents as personal records was an official act of the president.
Cannon, who is in charge of the document proceedings, was a Trump appointee. Critics accuse her of dragging out the proceedings and processing applications in slow motion.
As justification for postponing the start of the trial, Cannon wrote that setting a trial date at this point in time would be "imprudent."
There are too many unresolved legal issues that still need to be clarified, Cannon said. It would take appropriate preparation and time to address them fully and fairly in order to present this case to a jury.
Trump is facing a total of four criminal proceedings against him. In addition to the trial in the document affair and the hush money case in New York, there is also an election fraud trial at federal level and another in the US state of Georgia.
Trump's lawyers are also invoking presidential immunity in the federal election fraud case in an attempt to stop the proceedings.
The US Supreme Court has accepted Trump's appeal in this case and is currently dealing with the central question of his immunity from prosecution. A decision is expected in a few weeks.
This is also likely to have an impact on most of the other criminal proceedings against Trump.
Trump, who wants to become president again, regularly describes the investigations against him as a "political witch hunt" and portrays himself as a victim of the justice system.
So far, the investigations against Trump have not hurt him in the polls. This could change if he is convicted by a jury before the election. He is trying to delay the various proceedings against him as much as possible with legal technicalities.