Judge in Mar-a-Lago case rejects dismissal

The federal judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case on Thursday denied initial attempts by Trump’s two co-defendants to have the charges against them dismissed.

The ruling by the judge, Aileen Cannon, was the first time she had rejected dismissal motions by the two men, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, both of whom work for Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida.

Prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, say that Nauta, one of Trump’s closest personal aides, and De Oliveira, the property manager of Mar-aLago, conspired with the former president to hide from the government boxes of classified materials that Trump had removed from the White House, and then took part in a related plot to destroy security camera footage of the boxes being moved. The men have also been charged with lying to investigators working on the case.

At a hearing last week in U.S. District Court in Fort Pierce, lawyers for the two men tried to convince Cannon that their clients had no idea that the boxes they had moved on Trump’s behalf contained classified materials. The lawyers also said they needed more details about the evidence against the men than what was contained in the 53-page superseding indictment.

Nauta’s lawyer, Stanley Woodward Jr., raised an additional claim: that the obstruction statute his client was charged with violating was unconstitutionally vague.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard somewhat similar arguments about that law, which has been used not only against hundreds of pro-Trump rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, but also against Trump himself in both the classified documents case and the federal case in which he stands accused of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.

In an eight-page order, Cannon wrote that the men’s claims that they were unaware they had moved classified material for Trump were better suited to be used as defenses when the case goes to trial. The judge also found that Smith’s indictment had been drafted properly and that prosecutors were “not legally obligated to provide more detail” than what was already in it.

As for Woodward’s claim that the obstruction law was vague, Cannon wrote that it was “worthy of serious consideration,” but was not enough for her to “conclude that dismissal of the obstruction counts is warranted.”

Cannon has already rejected two of Trump’s motions to dismiss his own charges, although she has left open the possibility that the claims he raised in the motions could be used as trial defenses.

In March, she rebuffed an argument by Trump’s lawyers that the Espionage Act, the central statute in the indictment, was impermissibly vague and should be struck down in its entirety.

This month, she ruled that Trump could not escape prosecution in the case by arguing that he had converted the highly sensitive records he took from the White House into his own personal property under a law known as the Presidential Records Act.

Cannon has still not reached a decision on several other dismissal motions filed by Trump and Nauta, and she has yet to set a new date for the trial, which was originally scheduled to begin next month but now seems unlikely to start before midsummer.