Even though another federal court has ruled on the matter, Judge Aileen Cannon said she would hold a hearing to determine whether prosecutors can use information from one of the former president’s lawyers.
The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case said on Thursday that she intended to look anew at a hugely consequential legal victory that prosecutors won last year and that served as a cornerstone of the obstruction charges filed against Mr. Trump.
In her ruling, the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, said she would hold a hearing to reconsider another judge’s decision to allow prosecutors to pierce the attorney-client privilege of one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers under what is known as the crime-fraud exception.
That provision allows the government to get around the normal protections afforded to a lawyer’s communications with a client if it can prove that legal advice was used to commit a crime.
Depending on how Judge Cannon ultimately rules, her decision to redo the fraught and lengthy legal arguments about the crime-fraud exception could deal a serious blow to the obstruction charges in the indictment of Mr. Trump. Even if she ends up confirming the initial judge’s findings, holding yet another hearing on the issue will take more time and play into Mr. Trump’s strategy of delaying the case from going to trial for as long as possible.
Judge Cannon’s decision, contained in an 11-page ruling, came two days after Mr. Trump’s lawyers and prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, held a sealed hearing in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., to discuss whether to relitigate the battle over the crime-fraud exception.
At the hearing, according to the ruling, Mr. Smith’s deputies told her that a new proceeding on the question would “devolve into a ‘mini-trial’” that might subject some of their witnesses to cross-examination before the actual trial began.