Newsman: The federal judge once again rejected requests by the former president’s legal team to dismiss the charges against him on overseeing special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents case against Donald Trump according to an order filed Monday evening.
Jack Smith charged Trump with 40 counts that include the unlawful retention of national defense information after investigators recovered hundreds of classified documents from his time in the White House at his Florida estate. The former president and his co-defendants — aide Walta Nauta and former Mar-a-Lago employee Carlos de Oliveira — are also accused of engaging in an alleged scheme to obstruct the federal probe.
All three have pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.
Trump, Nauta and de Oliveira made numerous arguments to the court in their bid to dismiss the charges before going to trial, including that several alleged crimes were listed under a single charge and that prosecutors failed to show Nauta and de Oliveria knew classified documents were contained in the boxes they are accused of moving. The defense also claimed the form in which the charges were written was technically insufficient.
Judge Aileen Cannon rejected those claims because she said the language in the indictment was legally permissible. In some circumstances, she wrote the issues could be raised by the defense at trial.
Judge Cannon denied numerous claims by Trump’s defense attorneys and his co-defendants arguing the 2023 indictment was technically flawed, but she criticized prosecutors’ description of one incident as unnecessary to the charges and agreed to strike a single paragraph from the charging document because she said it “improperly contained uncharged offense allegations.”
The judge’s ruling criticized the style of the special counsel’s indictment as containing “nonessential allegations more akin to a narrative about the government’s theory of prosecution.” Cannon wrote the “speaking indictment” — a term used to describe a descriptive charging document — contained allegations and language against Trump that were “legally unnecessary” to the underlying charges.
Judge Aileen Cannon ruled nearly all of the 60-page indictment would stand, except for a single paragraph in which prosecutors described a moment in 2021 when Trump allegedly showed an individual who did not hold a security clearance a classified map of a foreign nation.
A trial date in the case has yet to be set as the judge said she is working through other pretrial matters.
Special counsel Smith also charged Trump in Washington, D.C., with four federal counts alleging he worked to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election. The former president pleaded not guilty to those charges and the case is presently on hold as the Supreme Court considers his claims of presidential immunity from prosecution.
