Judge Aileen Cannon denies another Trump motion to dismiss confidential documents case

A federal judge on Monday denied an attempt to dismiss former President Donald Trump’s confidential documents case but agreed to delete a paragraph from the superseding federal indictment against the former president.

While rejecting the defendants’ efforts to dismiss the obstruction and false statements of the prosecution, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon sided with them in finding that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office could not include allegations about an incident in which Trump allegedly flashed a “PAC Representative,” identified in many public reports as Susie Wiles, a classified map of a certain foreign country where an “ongoing military operation” was “not going well.”

Trump and his co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos DeOliveira, asked Cannon to attack a variety of what they characterized as damaging allegations. Cannon wrote that he agreed “that much of the language of the Superseding Indictment is legally unnecessary to serve the function of an indictment,” as detailed in the case law. She further noted “the risks that may arise from a prosecutor’s decision to include in a charging document an extensive narrative account of his or her view of the facts, especially in cases of significant public interest.”

But ultimately, Cannon agreed to eliminate only paragraph 36, which details the incident on the map.

Cannon reached this paragraph after discovering that his sole purpose in the prosecution was to highlight a previous bad act by the former president, noting that evidence of a defendant’s previous crimes or mistakes is usually litigated after notifying the defendant of how the prosecution intends to use it . evidence and related movement practices.

A campaign spokesperson and a lawyer for Trump did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday night.

The map incident is not the main focus of the case, which alleges that the former president intentionally withheld national defense information in connection with classified documents that were discovered at his Florida estate after he left office and that he ordered a attack on Mar-a-Lago. employee to delete property security video. Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges and the trial was postponed indefinitely.

Trump’s legal team also filed a separate motion to dismiss the classified documents case on Monday, saying the charges should be dropped because the FBI agents who searched Mar-a-Lago did not preserve the original order in which the documents were filed. and other papers were placed. Trump’s boxes – destroying “exculpatory evidence supporting one of the most basic defenses available to President Trump,” they wrote.

“The Office of Special Counsel unfairly alleged that President Trump was aware of the contents of the boxes in August 2022, where those boxes were packed by others at the White House and moved to Florida in January 2021,” Todd Blanche, Chris Kise and Emil Bove wrote. “The fact that the allegedly confidential documents were buried in boxes and mixed with President Trump’s personal effects since his first term strongly supported the defense’s argument that he lacked knowledge and culpable criminal intent with respect to the documents in question. .”

The special counsel’s office declined to comment to NBC News about Trump’s motion.

In a statement included in the brief filed by the former president’s defense lawyers, the special counsel’s office said Trump “failed to provide factual or legal support for an allegation of spoliation under the control of the jurisprudence of the Eleventh Circuit and the Supreme Court ”. and other legal obligations. Defendant’s allegations of misconduct are, once again, false.

In a court filing last month, the special counsel’s office described the procedures during the Mar-a-Lago search, saying an “initial screening team was careful to ensure that no documents were moved from one box to another, but I wasn’t focused on maintaining the sequence of documents within each box.” The suit added that if the separate investigative team found a document with classification marks, they would “remove the document, separate it, and replace it with a placeholder sheet.”

Investigators “seized any box that contained documents with classification marks or presidential records,” the document said.