FORT PIERCE, Florida — A federal judge in Florida expressed skepticism Friday about the feasibility of special counsel Jack Smith’s plan to bring Donald Trump to trial in July on charges that he stashed government secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving office.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon did not immediately signal whether she believes the trial can still occur before the 2024 presidential election. But during the morning session of a pivotal hearing in the case, she worried that the complex legal issues surrounding the classified evidence required for the trial would quickly chew up the calendar over the next four months.

And Trump’s team underscored that the former president’s ability to prepare for the Florida trial would be even more constrained because of the separate criminal trial he’s facing in New York. The New York trial, on charges of falsifying business records, will start March 25 and could span six weeks or more.

The classified documents trial in Florida is officially scheduled to begin May 20, but Cannon is all but certain to postpone it. The question is how long it will be delayed. On Thursday evening, Smith urged her to set a new trial date of July 8, while Trump’s lawyers renewed their longstanding position that the trial should not occur until after the election.

“A lot of work needs to be done in the pretrial phase of this case,” Cannon said in court on Friday, with Trump looking on from the defense table.

The judge said prosecutors’ proposed timeline would compress a lot of pretrial arguments and deliberation into very short windows. “To try to do 13 motions in a day or even two days seems unrealistic,” said Cannon, who was appointed to the federal bench by Trump in the final months of his presidency.

At one point, the judge seemed to take umbrage at what she viewed as a suggestion by Jay Bratt, one of the top prosecutors working for Smith, that she wasn’t moving quickly enough.

“I can assure you that, in the building, there’s a good deal of judicial work going on,” Cannon said.

The backdrop of the 2024 campaign is critical because, if Trump is elected and the trial is still pending, he could order the Justice Department to shut down the case. But Cannon took pains to avoid referencing the election. Even when she did allude to it, she did it obliquely, using a numerical citation to ask Smith’s team about a Justice Department regulation prohibiting certain investigative steps in close proximity to an election.

“That provision does not apply in a case that has already been charged,” Bratt responded, adding that the special counsel’s team had consulted with the Justice Department unit that handles most cases involving politicians and candidates, the Public Integrity Section. “It does not apply to setting a trial date.”

In some of the most pointed language of the hearing, Bratt criticized a fallback option that Trump’s lawyers proposed in their Thursday filing. If Cannon does not push the trial until after the election, Trump’s lawyers suggested, she could schedule it to begin in August. But Bratt said that proposal was just a subterfuge for the former president to seek further delays that would achieve his primary goal of preventing a trial before the election.

“What it really seems to me is that those were fake dates and really almost bad faith dates,” Bratt said. “We just need to bring this case to trial this summer.”

Trump’s lawyer, Todd Blanche, argued that the former president could not receive a fair trial during the final stretch of the presidential campaign.

“The real question the special counsel hasn’t answered is whether they agree it would be complete election interference [to hold a trial] around the time of the election,” Blanche declared.

The judge seemed to agree with Trump’s lawyers that prosecutors were giving short shrift to Trump’s rights by suggesting that a variety of classified proceedings should take place during the time where his New York trial is expected to be underway. That trial is planned to run every weekday except for Wednesdays, which will make it unreasonable for Trump and his counsel to race to Florida for one-day federal court sessions, Blanche said.

Bratt said the apparent scheduling conflict was essentially the fault of Trump’s lawyers for agreeing to defend him in both cases, but Cannon disagreed.

“It’s not just the choice of counsel. It’s the accused’s right to participate,” the judge told Bratt.

Cannon also signaled that she sees some merit in the defense’s claims that other components of the federal government should be treated as parts of the prosecution team — a critical issue in determining how much evidence Trump and his two co-defendants are entitled to. Trump has claimed that large swaths of the federal government, from the National Archives to the intelligence community, should be considered part of Smith’s apparatus, a contention that the special counsel says is overly broad.

“It does appear to be narrower than potentially warranted,” the judge said near the conclusion of the morning session.

Cannon sounded inclined to grant the defendants a hearing on the perimeters of Smith’s team, although she also appeared to be seeking ways to limit that courtroom exploration to a few agencies rather than the entire intelligence community and, perhaps, the White House.

Trump attended Friday’s hearing, as he has done in recent proceedings in several of his criminal cases, sitting ensconced between Blanche and Emil Bove, another member of his legal team. The former president occasionally whispered to them, but generally faced forward, looking at the lectern where the attorneys stood as they addressed the judge.

As the hearing broke for lunch, Trump briefly appeared miffed when security escorted Smith out of the courtroom before him, forcing him to wait for their exit.

Outside the courthouse, a gathering of more than a hundred Trump supporters was in full swing. Country music played over the speakers as people waved flags with “Trump 2024” on them.

Joanna Lopes attended a similar gathering during an earlier hearing in Fort Pierce, and she said she came back for this one because of the tailgate-like environment.

“It’s friendly,” Lopes said. “Everyone is safe here. Everyone’s out here for the right reasons.”

Gerstein and Duncan reported from Fort Pierce. Cheney reported from Washington.