Judge rejects ex-prez Trump’s bid to throw out classified docs case
A federal judge refused on Thursday to throw out the classified documents prosecution of Donald Trump, turning aside defence arguments that a decades-old law permitted the former president to retain the sensitive records after he left office.
Lawyers for Trump had cited a 1978 statute known as the Presidential Records Act in demanding that the case, one of four against the presumptive Republican nominee, be tossed out before trial.
That law requires presidents upon leaving office to turn over presidential records to the federal government but permits them to retain purely personal papers. Trump’s lawyers have said he designated the records as personal, making them his own property, and that decision cannot be second-guessed in court.
Prosecutors on special counsel Jack Smith’s team countered that the law had no relevance to a case concerning the mishandling of classified documents and said the files Trump is alleged to have hoarded at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida were unquestionably presidential records, not personal ones, and therefore had to be returned to the government when Trump left the White House.
US District Judge Aileen Cannon, who heard arguments on the dispute last month, permitted the case to proceed in a three-page order that rejected the Trump team claims.
She wrote that the indictment makes “no reference to the Presidential Records Act” nor does it “rely on that statute for purposes of stating an offence”. The act, she said, ”does not provide a pretrial basis to dismiss” the case.
The ruling is the second time in three weeks that Cannon has rebuffed defense efforts to derail the case. It represents a modest win for Smith’s team, which has been trying to push the prosecution forward to trial this year but has also expressed mounting frustration, including earlier this week, with Cannon’s oversight of the case.
Other Trump motions to dismiss the indictment remain unresolved by the judge, the trial date is in flux, and additional legal disputes have slowed the progress of a case that prosecutors say features voluminous evidence of guilt by the former president.
In Thursday’s ruling, Cannon also defended an order from last month that asked lawyers for both sides to formulate potential jury instructions and to respond to two different scenarios in which she appeared to be continuing to entertain Trump’s presidential records argument.
The order puzzled legal experts and drew a sharp rebuke from Smith’s team, with prosecutors in a filing this week calling the premises the judge laid out “fundamentally flawed” and warning that they were prepared to appeal if she pushed ahead with jury instructions that they considered wrong.
“The Court’s Order soliciting preliminary draft instructions on certain counts should not be misconstrued as declaring a final definition on any essential element or asserted defence in this case,” Cannon wrote.
Cannon has yet to rule on other Trump efforts to dismiss the case, including arguments of presidential immunity and that he has been subject to “selective prosecution.”