WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge has Confidential Documents Incident Prosecutors against former President Donald Trump and two of his top aides on Monday removed a paragraph from the indictment but rejected a defense request to dismiss some charges.
The paragraph concerns allegations that President Trump showed a representative of his political action committee a classified map of a foreign country while discussing a military operation that is going awry after he leaves office in 2021.
The defense argued the phrase was unrelated to any crimes charged in the indictment, which accuses Trump of illegally storing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, and was prejudicial. U.S. District Judge Eileen Cannon agreed on Monday that the indictment's inclusion of the phrase was “improper.”
The ruling has little practical impact on the case, as Judge Cannon left the remainder of the indictment intact and denied a request to dismiss the actual charges in a 14-page order. However, while she rejected a defense motion to dismiss several counts, she did: Special Counsel Jack Smith's Team The indictment contained language that was “legally unnecessary to function as an indictment” and that some of the language created “contentious confusion.”
A spokesman for Smith declined to comment Monday night.
The motion to dismiss the case is Multiple pretrial claims and disputes Lawsuits that had been piling up before Cannon for months had stalled the case, leading a judge to rule last month that The trial scheduled for May 20 has been postponed indefinitely. In Fort Pierce, Florida.
She is scheduled to make additional arguments later this month, including on Trump's challenges to the legality and funding of the Justice Department's appointment of Smith as special counsel last year.
The delay in the case is all the more surprising given that many legal experts viewed the charge that Trump illegally obtained classified documents as fairly straightforward. Hidden classified documents They stole funds from the President's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and thwarted FBI attempts to recover them.
The prosecution said: Trump faces four criminal cases He is seeking to retake the White House, New York hush money caseBut the other three cases appear unlikely to go to trial before the November presidential election, in which Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee.
The defendants in the motion are seeking to dismiss more than a half-dozen charges in the indictment, which also accuse Trump of conspiring. Valet Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos de Oliveira To hide secret files from the government.
The defendants had contested the obstruction and false statement charges, arguing they were duplicative and possibly prejudicial.
But Judge Cannon wrote in his order Monday that “the defects identified, even if they create arguable confusion, are admissible at law, or raise evidentiary objections that are improper to dispose of at this point, or so long as the jury was properly instructed and a full written verdict was presented regarding each defendant's alleged conduct, the case need not be overruled even if technically defective.”
The judge has already ruled that Trump “ Presidential Records Act Keeping documents after you leave the White House and designating them as your personal files.
