Judge rejects Trump bid to dismiss classified documents prosecution
WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Thursday refused to throw out the classified documents prosecution against former President Donald Trump, turning aside defense arguments that a decades-old law permitted him to retain the 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.
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 records Trump is alleged to have hoarded at his Mar-a-Lago estate were unquestionably presidential records, not personal files, and therefore had to be returned to the government when Trump left the White House in January 2021.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who heard arguments on the matter last month, permitted the case to proceed in a three-page order that rejected defense claims. She wrote that the 40-count indictment against Trump makes “no reference to the Presidential Records Act” nor does it “rely on that statute for purposes of stating an offense.”
Cannon has yet to rule on other Trump efforts to dismiss the case, including arguments that presidential immunity shields him from prosecution and that he has been subject to “selective and vindictive prosecution.”
Also Thursday, the judge overseeing the Georgia election interference case against Trump and others rejected arguments by the former president that the indictment seeks to criminalize political speech protected by the First Amendment.
The indictment accused Trump and 18 others of participating in a wideranging scheme to illegally try to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia after the Republican incumbent narrowly lost the state to Democrat Joe Biden. Trump’s attorneys argued that all the charges against him involved political speech that is protected even if the speech ends up being false.
But Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee wrote that at this pretrial stage he must consider the language of the indictment in a light favorable to the prosecution. The charges do not suggest that Trump and the others are being prosecuted simply for making false statements but rather that they acted willfully and knowingly to harm the government, he wrote.