Given U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s slow handling of Donald Trump’s case involving classified documents and the backlog of filing motions to block a trial, it’s always notable when she makes decisions that could one day allow a trial to take place.
That happened Monday, when she rejected a defense motion seeking to dismiss the charge for “pleading defects,” while in the process she deleted a paragraph from the indictment.
The defense had raised a series of technical arguments about the way the indictment is structured that were not expected to prevail. So Cannon’s rejection was justified, although she didn’t have to take that long or hold a hearing to reach that obvious result. The bottom line, she wrote in an order, is that:
And she deleted that paragraph from the indictment? That is paragraph 36, which reads:
To be clear, Trump is not directly accused of the conduct in that paragraph, so this is not a dismissal of any charges. Instead, the judge explained in her order that the information in that paragraph was included as another crime, wrong or act in addition to the specific crimes charged. The judge deemed it inappropriate to file the charges, but left open the possibility that the case would go to trial, subject to further litigation.
So while the government would naturally prefer that Cannon had not violated that language, it is not a move that would derail Florida’s federal case against the former president. That derailment is being brought about by Cannon’s generally slow handling of the case, which has no trial date and which Trump will surely crush if he wins the White House again in November.
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This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
