WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal judge presiding over the case of classified documents against former President Donald Trump and two of his associates withdrew a paragraph from the indictment on Monday but denied a defense request to dismiss some of the allegations.
The paragraph concerns allegations that Trump, in 2021, when he was no longer president, showed a confidential 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 lawyers said the paragraph was prejudicial because it included information that was not irrelevant to the indictment, which accuses Trump of illegally retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, and U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon agreed on Monday that the inclusion of the language in charging documents was “not appropriate.”
She left the rest of the indictment intact, denying in her 14-page order a defense request to dismiss the actual charges in the indictment. But even 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 creating “debatable confusion” in the allegations.
The motion to dismiss the charges is one of the multiple requests and pre-trial disputes that had been piling up before Cannon for months, hindering the progress of the case and leading the judge last month to indefinitely postpone a trial that was scheduled for May 20 in Fort Pierce, Florida.
She has scheduled additional arguments for later this month, including a challenge by Trump to the legality and funding of Smith’s appointment as special counsel by the Justice Department last year.
The delays are all the more surprising given that many legal experts have called the confidential documents case extremely straightforward in its claims that Trump had illegally accumulated confidential documents of his presidency at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and obstructed the FBI’s efforts to recover them.
The accusation is one of the four criminal cases Trump faces as he seeks to reclaim the White House.
The defendants in this particular motion sought to dismiss more than half a dozen 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 confidential government files.
The defendants disputed charges related to obstruction and false statements, but Cannon said in an order Monday that “the identified deficiencies, even if they generate some arguable confusion, are permitted by law, raise evidentiary challenges not appropriate for resolution at this time, and /or not require dismissal, even if technically deficient, as long as the jury is properly instructed and presented with appropriate verdict forms regarding the alleged conduct of each Defendant.
Cannon has already rejected several other motions to dismiss the case, including one that suggested Trump was authorized by a statute known as Presidential Records Act keep the documents with him after he left the White House and designate them as his personal files.
