WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal judge presiding over the secret documents case against former President Donald Trump and two of his associates on Monday struck out a paragraph from the indictment but denied a defense request to release some of dismiss the charges.
The paragraph addresses allegations that in 2021, when he was no longer president, Trump showed a secret map of a foreign country to a representative of his political action committee while discussing a military operation that he said was not going well.
Defense attorneys said the paragraph was prejudicial because it contained information that was irrelevant to the indictment, which accuses Trump of illegally keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Aileen Kanon agreed Monday that the inclusion of the language in tax documents was “not appropriate.”
She left the rest of the indictment intact and in her fourteen-page order denied a defense request to dismiss the actual charge in the indictment. But as she did so, she chided Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team for including language in the indictment that she said was “legally unnecessary to serve the function of an indictment” and for finding “arguable confusion” in the charges had created.
The motion to dismiss the charges is one of several requests and pretrial disputes that have piled up before Cannon for months, hampering the case’s progress and prompting the judge last month to set a May 20 trial. Fort Pierce would take place, postponed indefinitely. , Fla.
She has additional arguments scheduled for later this month, including on a challenge by Trump to the legality and funding of the Justice Department’s appointment of Smith as special counsel last year.
The delays are all the more surprising given that many legal experts had seen the classified documents case as extremely straightforward amid allegations that Trump illegally hoarded classified documents from his presidency at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and hampered the FBI’s efforts to recover them.
The prosecution is one of four criminal cases Trump faces in his bid to win back the White House.
The defendants in this particular motion had sought to dismiss more than six counts in the indictment, which also accuses Trump of conspiring with valet Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira to hide the sensitive files from police. government.
The defendants had contested charges related to obstruction and false statements, but Cannon said in an order Monday that “the identified deficiencies, even if they cause some demonstrable confusion or are authorized by law, raise evidence not appropriate to presently time, and/or do not require a dismissal, even if technically inadequate, so long as the jury is properly instructed and presented with appropriate verdict forms regarding each defendant’s alleged conduct.”
Cannon has already denied several other motions to dismiss the case, including one that suggested Trump was authorized under a statute known as the Presidential Records Act to keep the documents with him after he left the White House and to be designated as his personal files.
