His lawyers filed an emergency appeal with the court on Monday, just four days after the justices heard Trump’s separate appeal to remain on the presidential ballot despite attempts to kick him off because of his efforts following his election loss in 2020.
“Without immunity from criminal prosecution, the Presidency as we know it will cease to exist,” Trump's lawyers wrote, repeating arguments that have so far failed in federal courts.
The filing keeps on hold what would be a landmark criminal trial of a former president while the nation’s highest court decides what to do. It met a deadline to ask the justices to intervene that the federal appeals court in Washington set when it rejected Trump’s immunity claims and ruled the trial could proceed.
The Supreme Court’s decision on what to do, and how quickly it acts, could determine whether the Republican presidential primary frontrunner stands trial in the case before the November election.
There is no timetable for the court to act, but special counsel Jack Smith’s team has strongly pushed for the trial to take place this year. Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly sought to delay the case. If Trump were to defeat President Joe Biden, he could potentially try to use his position as head of the executive branch to order a new attorney general to dismiss the federal cases he faces or even seek a pardon for himself.
The Supreme Court’s options include rejecting the emergency appeal, which would enable U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to restart the trial proceedings in Washington's federal court. The trial was initially scheduled to begin in early March.
The court also could extend the delay while it hears arguments on the immunity issue. In that event, the schedule the justices set could determine how soon a trial might begin, if indeed they agree with lower court rulings that Trump is not immune from prosecution.
In December, Smith and his team had urged the justices to take up and decide the immunity issue, even before the appeals court weighed in. “It is of imperative public importance that Respondent’s claim of immunity be resolved by this Court and that Respondent’s trial proceed as promptly as possible if his claim of immunity is rejected,” prosecutors wrote in December.
Trump's legal team has ascribed partisan motives to the prosecution's push for a prompt trial. “Conducting a months-long criminal trial of President Trump at the height of election season will radically disrupt President Trump’s ability to campaign against President Biden — which appears to be the whole point of the Special Counsel’s persistent demands for expedition,” the former president's lawyers wrote.
Courts should not rush into a trial because the subject of presidential immunity from criminal charges is “a novel, complex, and momentous question that warrants careful consideration on appeal,” the legal team led by D. John Sauer wrote.
In their request to keep the trial on hold, Trump's lawyers indicated they would seek to stretch out the delay by also asking the full federal appeals court in Washington to weigh in. Only after that would they file a formal appeal to the Supreme Court, the lawyers wrote. That could add weeks, if not months, before trial preparations could restart.
Now it's up to a court on which three justices, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, were appointed by Trump when he was president. They have moved the court to the right in major decisions that overturned abortion rights, expanded gun rights and ended affirmative action in college admissions.
But the Supreme Court hasn't been especially friendly to Trump on legal matters directly concerning the former president. The court declined to take up several appeals filed by Trump and his allies related to the 2020 election. It also refused to prevent tax files and other documents from being turned over to congressional committees and prosecutors in New York.
Last week, however, the justices did seem likely to end the efforts to prevent Trump from being on the 2024 ballot. A decision in that case could come any time.
The Supreme Court has previously held that presidents are immune from civil liability for official acts, and Trump’s lawyers have for months argued that that protection should be extended to criminal prosecution as well.
Last week, a unanimous panel of two judges appointed by President Joe Biden and one by a Republican president sharply rejected Trump’s novel claim that former presidents enjoy absolute immunity for actions that fall within their official job duties. It was the second time since December that judges have held that Trump can be prosecuted for actions undertaken while in the White House and in the run-up to Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.
The case was argued before Judges Florence Pan and J. Michelle Childs, appointees of Biden, a Democrat, and Karen LeCraft Henderson, who was named to the bench by President George H.W. Bush, a Republican.
The case in Washington is one of four prosecutions Trump faces as he seeks to reclaim the White House. He faces federal charges in Florida that he illegally retained classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, a case that was also brought by Smith and is set for trial in May.
He’s also charged in state court in Georgia with scheming to subvert that state’s 2020 election and in New York in connection with hush money payments made to porn actor Stormy Daniels. He has denied any wrongdoing.
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Judge to hear arguments on whether to dismiss Trump's classified documents prosecution
By ERIC TUCKER, ALANNA DURKIN RICHER and TERRY SPENCER
Today
FORT PIERCE, Fla. (AP) — A federal judge will hear arguments Thursday on whether to dismiss the classified documents prosecution of Donald Trump, with his attorneys asserting that the former president was entitled to keep the sensitive records with him when he left the White House and headed to Florida.
The dispute centers on the Trump team's interpretation of the Presidential Records Act, which they say gave him the authority to designate the documents as personal and maintain possession of them after his presidency.
Special counsel Jack Smith's team, by contrast, says the files Trump is charged with possessing are presidential records, not personal ones, and that the statute does not apply to classified and top-secret documents like those kept at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
The Presidential Records Act "does not exempt Trump from the criminal law, entitle him to unilaterally declare highly classified presidential records to be personal records, or shield him from criminal investigations — let alone allow him to obstruct a federal investigation with impunity,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing last week.
It was not clear when U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon might rule, but the outcome will determine whether the case proceeds or whether, as Trump's lawyers hope, it is thrown out before ever reaching a jury — a rare action for a judge to take.
Cannon, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, is also expected to hear arguments Thursday on a separate but related Trump team motion that says the statute that forms the bulk of the criminal charges — making it a crime to willfully retain national defense information — is unconstitutionally vague as it applies to a former president.
It is not surprising that defense lawyers are seeking dismissal of the case based on the Presidential Records Act given that the legal team has repeatedly invoked the statute since the FBI's August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago.
The law, enacted in 1978, requires presidents upon leaving office to transfer their presidential records to the U.S. government for management — specifically, the National Archives and Records Administration — though they are permitted to retain personal records, including diaries and notes that are purely private and not prepared for government business.
Trump's lawyers have said that he designated as personal property the records he took with him to Mar-a-Lago, which prosecutors say included top-secret information and documents related to nuclear programs and the military capabilities of the U.S. and foreign adversaries.
Cannon has suggested in the past that she sees Trump's status as a former president as distinguishing him from others who have held onto classified records.
More recently, even while ruling in favor of Smith's team on a procedural question, Cannon pointedly described the case as the “first-ever criminal prosecution of a former United States President — once the country’s chief classification authority over many of the documents the Special Counsel now seeks to withhold from him (and his cleared counsel) — in a case without charges of transmission or delivery of national defense information."
Trump faces 40 felony counts in Florida that accuse him of willfully retaining dozens of classified documents and rebuffing government demands to give them back after he left the White House. Prosecutors in recent court filings have stressed the scope of criminal conduct that they say they expect to prove at trial, saying in one that “there has never been a case in American history in which a former official has engaged in conduct remotely similar to Trump’s.”
They allege, for instance, that Trump intentionally held onto some of the nation’s most sensitive documents — only returning a fraction of them upon demand by the National Archives — and then urged his lawyer to hide records and to lie to the FBI by saying he no longer was in possession of them. He’s also charged with enlisting staff to delete surveillance footage that would show boxes of documents being moved around the property.
The hearing is the second this month in the case in Florida, one of four prosecutions Trump confronts as he seeks to reclaim the White House this year. Cannon heard arguments on March 1 on when to set a trial date, but has not immediately ruled. Both sides have proposed summertime dates for the trial to begin.
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udge rejects bid by Donald Trump to throw out classified documents case on constitutional grounds
By ERIC TUCKER, ALANNA DURKIN RICHER and TERRY SPENCER
Yesterday
FORT PIERCE, Fla. (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday rejected one bid by Donald Trump to throw out out his classified documents criminal case, and appeared skeptical during hours of arguments of a separate effort to scuttle the prosecution ahead of trial.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon issued a two-page order saying that though the Trump team had raised “various arguments warranting serious consideration,” a dismissal of charges was not merited. The case involves boxes of records, some highly classified, that Trump took to his Mar-a-Lago estate when he left the White House.
Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by the former president, had made clear during more than three-and-a-half hours of arguments that she was reluctant to dismiss one of the four criminal cases against the 2024 presumptive Republican presidential nominee. She said at one point that a dismissal of the indictment would be “difficult to see” and that it would be “quite an extraordinary” step to strike down an Espionage Act statute that underpins the bulk of the felony counts against Trump but that his lawyers contend is unconstitutionally vague.
But it left unanswered questions over when the case might proceed to trial and only covered one of the two motions argued in court on Thursday. A separate motion about whether Trump was permitted under the Presidential Records Act to retain the documents after he left the White House remains pending, but the judge also seemed disinclined to throw out the case on those grounds.
“It’s difficult to see how this gets you to the dismissal of an indictment,” she told a Trump lawyer.
Trump attended Thursday's arguments, listening intently with his hands sometimes clasped in front of him on the defense table as his attorneys pressed Cannon to throw out the case.
The hearing was the second this month in the case in Florida, which has unfolded slowly in the courts since prosecutors first brought charges last June. Cannon heard arguments on March 1 on when to schedule a new trial date — it was initially set for May 20 — but has yet to announce one and gave no indication Thursday on when she might do so. Prosecutors have pressed the judge to set a date for this summer. Trump’s lawyers are hoping to put it off until after the election.
After the hearing, Trump on his Truth Social platform took note of the “big crowds” outside the courthouse, which included supporters with flags and signs who honked their car horns in solidarity with the ex-president. He again said the prosecution is a “witch hunt” inspired by President Joe Biden.
Some of Thursday’s arguments centered on the 1978 statute known as the Presidential Records Act. The law requires presidential documents to be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration, though former presidents may retain notes and papers created for purely personal reasons.
His lawyers say the act entitled him to designate as personal property the records he took with him to Mar-a-Lago in Florida and that he was free to do with the documents as he pleased.
“He had original classification authority,” said defense lawyer Todd Blanche. “He had the authority to do whatever he thought was appropriate with his records.”
Prosecutors countered that those records were clearly presidential, not personal, and included top-secret information and documents related to nuclear programs and the military capabilities of the U.S. and foreign countries. They say the presidential records statute was never meant to permit presidents to retain classified and top-secret documents, like those kept at Mar-a-Lago.
“The documents charged in the indictment are not personal records, period. They are not,” Harbach said. “They are nowhere close to it under the definition of the Presidential Records Act.”
Trump’s lawyers separately challenged as overly vague a statute that makes it a crime to have unauthorized retention of national defense information, a charge that forms the basis of 32 of the 40 felony counts against Trump in the case.
Defense lawyer Emil Bove said ambiguity in the statute permits what he called “selective” enforcement by the Justice Department, leading to Trump being charged but enabling others to avoid prosecution. Bove suggested a recent report by special counsel Robert Hur that criticized President Joe Biden’s handling of classified information did not recommend charges proved his point about the lack of clarity.
When a law is unclear, Bove told Cannon, “The court’s obligation is to strike the statute and say ‘Congress, get it right.’”
Jay Bratt, another prosecutor with Smith’s team, disputed that there was anything unclear about the law, and Cannon pointedly noted that striking down a statute would be “quite an extraordinary step.”
In her subsequent ruling rejecting the defense request, she cited “still-fluctuating definitions of statutory terms/phrases” along with “disputed factual issues" that could be decided by a jury.
Trump is accused of intentionally holding onto some of the nation’s most sensitive documents at Mar-a-Lago — only returning a fraction of them upon demand by the National Archives. Prosecutors say he urged his lawyer to hide records and to lie to the FBI by saying he no longer was in possession of them and enlisted staff to delete surveillance footage that would show boxes of documents being moved around the property.
Cannon has suggested in the past that she sees Trump’s status as a former president as distinguishing him from others who have held onto classified records.
On Thursday, she wrestled with the unprecedented nature of the case, noted that no former president had ever faced criminal jeopardy for mishandling classified information.
But, Bratt responded, “there was never a situation remotely similar to this one.”
Trump is separately charged in a federal case in Washington with conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Trump has argued in both federal cases that presidential immunity protects him from prosecution, though Cannon has not agreed to hear arguments on that claim in the documents case.
The U.S Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on Trump’s immunity claim in the election interference case next month.
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In one scenario, Cannon asked them to craft jury instructions that assume the PRA allows presidents to designate any documents as personal at the end of a presidency — which is what Trump’s legal team has argued he had the authority to do. She then said they should also write separate jury instructions predicated on the idea that jurists would be able to determine which of the documents Trump is accused of illegally retaining are personal and which are presidential.
The government has said it is the Espionage Act — not the PRA — that guards classified materials. Trump is not charged with violating the PRA, and prosecutors said throughout their filing that the PRA should not be in those instructions.
“The PRA’s distinction between personal and presidential records has no bearing on whether a former President’s possession of documents containing national defense information is authorized under the Espionage Act, and the PRA should play no role in the jury instructions,” Smith wrote. “Indeed, based on the current record, the PRA should not play any role at trial at all.”
Comments
WASHINGTON (AP) — Former President Donald Trump is asking the Supreme Court to extend the delay in his election interference trial, saying he is immune from prosecution on charges he plotted to overturn his 2020 election loss.
His lawyers filed an emergency appeal with the court on Monday, just four days after the justices heard Trump’s separate appeal to remain on the presidential ballot despite attempts to kick him off because of his efforts following his election loss in 2020.
“Without immunity from criminal prosecution, the Presidency as we know it will cease to exist,” Trump's lawyers wrote, repeating arguments that have so far failed in federal courts.
The filing keeps on hold what would be a landmark criminal trial of a former president while the nation’s highest court decides what to do. It met a deadline to ask the justices to intervene that the federal appeals court in Washington set when it rejected Trump’s immunity claims and ruled the trial could proceed.
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The Supreme Court’s decision on what to do, and how quickly it acts, could determine whether the Republican presidential primary frontrunner stands trial in the case before the November election.
There is no timetable for the court to act, but special counsel Jack Smith’s team has strongly pushed for the trial to take place this year. Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly sought to delay the case. If Trump were to defeat President Joe Biden, he could potentially try to use his position as head of the executive branch to order a new attorney general to dismiss the federal cases he faces or even seek a pardon for himself.
The Supreme Court’s options include rejecting the emergency appeal, which would enable U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to restart the trial proceedings in Washington's federal court. The trial was initially scheduled to begin in early March.
The court also could extend the delay while it hears arguments on the immunity issue. In that event, the schedule the justices set could determine how soon a trial might begin, if indeed they agree with lower court rulings that Trump is not immune from prosecution.
In December, Smith and his team had urged the justices to take up and decide the immunity issue, even before the appeals court weighed in. “It is of imperative public importance that Respondent’s claim of immunity be resolved by this Court and that Respondent’s trial proceed as promptly as possible if his claim of immunity is rejected,” prosecutors wrote in December.
Trump's legal team has ascribed partisan motives to the prosecution's push for a prompt trial. “Conducting a months-long criminal trial of President Trump at the height of election season will radically disrupt President Trump’s ability to campaign against President Biden — which appears to be the whole point of the Special Counsel’s persistent demands for expedition,” the former president's lawyers wrote.
Courts should not rush into a trial because the subject of presidential immunity from criminal charges is “a novel, complex, and momentous question that warrants careful consideration on appeal,” the legal team led by D. John Sauer wrote.
In their request to keep the trial on hold, Trump's lawyers indicated they would seek to stretch out the delay by also asking the full federal appeals court in Washington to weigh in. Only after that would they file a formal appeal to the Supreme Court, the lawyers wrote. That could add weeks, if not months, before trial preparations could restart.
Now it's up to a court on which three justices, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, were appointed by Trump when he was president. They have moved the court to the right in major decisions that overturned abortion rights, expanded gun rights and ended affirmative action in college admissions.
But the Supreme Court hasn't been especially friendly to Trump on legal matters directly concerning the former president. The court declined to take up several appeals filed by Trump and his allies related to the 2020 election. It also refused to prevent tax files and other documents from being turned over to congressional committees and prosecutors in New York.
Last week, however, the justices did seem likely to end the efforts to prevent Trump from being on the 2024 ballot. A decision in that case could come any time.
The Supreme Court has previously held that presidents are immune from civil liability for official acts, and Trump’s lawyers have for months argued that that protection should be extended to criminal prosecution as well.
Last week, a unanimous panel of two judges appointed by President Joe Biden and one by a Republican president sharply rejected Trump’s novel claim that former presidents enjoy absolute immunity for actions that fall within their official job duties. It was the second time since December that judges have held that Trump can be prosecuted for actions undertaken while in the White House and in the run-up to Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.
The case was argued before Judges Florence Pan and J. Michelle Childs, appointees of Biden, a Democrat, and Karen LeCraft Henderson, who was named to the bench by President George H.W. Bush, a Republican.
The case in Washington is one of four prosecutions Trump faces as he seeks to reclaim the White House. He faces federal charges in Florida that he illegally retained classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, a case that was also brought by Smith and is set for trial in May.
He’s also charged in state court in Georgia with scheming to subvert that state’s 2020 election and in New York in connection with hush money payments made to porn actor Stormy Daniels. He has denied any wrongdoing.
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how the fuck hard is it to not sleep with people you work with?
aside from bars and restaurant work, that is basically rule number 1.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
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FORT PIERCE, Fla. (AP) — A federal judge will hear arguments Thursday on whether to dismiss the classified documents prosecution of Donald Trump, with his attorneys asserting that the former president was entitled to keep the sensitive records with him when he left the White House and headed to Florida.
The dispute centers on the Trump team's interpretation of the Presidential Records Act, which they say gave him the authority to designate the documents as personal and maintain possession of them after his presidency.
Special counsel Jack Smith's team, by contrast, says the files Trump is charged with possessing are presidential records, not personal ones, and that the statute does not apply to classified and top-secret documents like those kept at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
The Presidential Records Act "does not exempt Trump from the criminal law, entitle him to unilaterally declare highly classified presidential records to be personal records, or shield him from criminal investigations — let alone allow him to obstruct a federal investigation with impunity,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing last week.
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It was not clear when U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon might rule, but the outcome will determine whether the case proceeds or whether, as Trump's lawyers hope, it is thrown out before ever reaching a jury — a rare action for a judge to take.
Cannon, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, is also expected to hear arguments Thursday on a separate but related Trump team motion that says the statute that forms the bulk of the criminal charges — making it a crime to willfully retain national defense information — is unconstitutionally vague as it applies to a former president.
It is not surprising that defense lawyers are seeking dismissal of the case based on the Presidential Records Act given that the legal team has repeatedly invoked the statute since the FBI's August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago.
The law, enacted in 1978, requires presidents upon leaving office to transfer their presidential records to the U.S. government for management — specifically, the National Archives and Records Administration — though they are permitted to retain personal records, including diaries and notes that are purely private and not prepared for government business.
Trump's lawyers have said that he designated as personal property the records he took with him to Mar-a-Lago, which prosecutors say included top-secret information and documents related to nuclear programs and the military capabilities of the U.S. and foreign adversaries.
Cannon has suggested in the past that she sees Trump's status as a former president as distinguishing him from others who have held onto classified records.
After the Trump team sued the Justice Department in 2022 to get his records back, Cannon appointed a special master to conduct an independent review of the documents taken during the FBI's Mar-a-Lago search. That appointment was later overturned by a federal appeals court.
More recently, even while ruling in favor of Smith's team on a procedural question, Cannon pointedly described the case as the “first-ever criminal prosecution of a former United States President — once the country’s chief classification authority over many of the documents the Special Counsel now seeks to withhold from him (and his cleared counsel) — in a case without charges of transmission or delivery of national defense information."
Trump faces 40 felony counts in Florida that accuse him of willfully retaining dozens of classified documents and rebuffing government demands to give them back after he left the White House. Prosecutors in recent court filings have stressed the scope of criminal conduct that they say they expect to prove at trial, saying in one that “there has never been a case in American history in which a former official has engaged in conduct remotely similar to Trump’s.”
They allege, for instance, that Trump intentionally held onto some of the nation’s most sensitive documents — only returning a fraction of them upon demand by the National Archives — and then urged his lawyer to hide records and to lie to the FBI by saying he no longer was in possession of them. He’s also charged with enlisting staff to delete surveillance footage that would show boxes of documents being moved around the property.
The hearing is the second this month in the case in Florida, one of four prosecutions Trump confronts as he seeks to reclaim the White House this year. Cannon heard arguments on March 1 on when to set a trial date, but has not immediately ruled. Both sides have proposed summertime dates for the trial to begin.
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FORT PIERCE, Fla. (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday rejected one bid by Donald Trump to throw out out his classified documents criminal case, and appeared skeptical during hours of arguments of a separate effort to scuttle the prosecution ahead of trial.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon issued a two-page order saying that though the Trump team had raised “various arguments warranting serious consideration,” a dismissal of charges was not merited. The case involves boxes of records, some highly classified, that Trump took to his Mar-a-Lago estate when he left the White House.
Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by the former president, had made clear during more than three-and-a-half hours of arguments that she was reluctant to dismiss one of the four criminal cases against the 2024 presumptive Republican presidential nominee. She said at one point that a dismissal of the indictment would be “difficult to see” and that it would be “quite an extraordinary” step to strike down an Espionage Act statute that underpins the bulk of the felony counts against Trump but that his lawyers contend is unconstitutionally vague.
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The ruling from Cannon is a modest win for special counsel Jack Smith's team, which in addition to the classified documents case is pursuing a separate prosecution of Trump on charges that he plotted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
But it left unanswered questions over when the case might proceed to trial and only covered one of the two motions argued in court on Thursday. A separate motion about whether Trump was permitted under the Presidential Records Act to retain the documents after he left the White House remains pending, but the judge also seemed disinclined to throw out the case on those grounds.
“It’s difficult to see how this gets you to the dismissal of an indictment,” she told a Trump lawyer.
Trump attended Thursday's arguments, listening intently with his hands sometimes clasped in front of him on the defense table as his attorneys pressed Cannon to throw out the case.
The hearing was the second this month in the case in Florida, which has unfolded slowly in the courts since prosecutors first brought charges last June. Cannon heard arguments on March 1 on when to schedule a new trial date — it was initially set for May 20 — but has yet to announce one and gave no indication Thursday on when she might do so. Prosecutors have pressed the judge to set a date for this summer. Trump’s lawyers are hoping to put it off until after the election.
After the hearing, Trump on his Truth Social platform took note of the “big crowds” outside the courthouse, which included supporters with flags and signs who honked their car horns in solidarity with the ex-president. He again said the prosecution is a “witch hunt” inspired by President Joe Biden.
Some of Thursday’s arguments centered on the 1978 statute known as the Presidential Records Act. The law requires presidential documents to be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration, though former presidents may retain notes and papers created for purely personal reasons.
His lawyers say the act entitled him to designate as personal property the records he took with him to Mar-a-Lago in Florida and that he was free to do with the documents as he pleased.
“He had original classification authority,” said defense lawyer Todd Blanche. “He had the authority to do whatever he thought was appropriate with his records.”
Prosecutors countered that those records were clearly presidential, not personal, and included top-secret information and documents related to nuclear programs and the military capabilities of the U.S. and foreign countries. They say the presidential records statute was never meant to permit presidents to retain classified and top-secret documents, like those kept at Mar-a-Lago.
“The documents charged in the indictment are not personal records, period. They are not,” Harbach said. “They are nowhere close to it under the definition of the Presidential Records Act.”
Trump’s lawyers separately challenged as overly vague a statute that makes it a crime to have unauthorized retention of national defense information, a charge that forms the basis of 32 of the 40 felony counts against Trump in the case.
Defense lawyer Emil Bove said ambiguity in the statute permits what he called “selective” enforcement by the Justice Department, leading to Trump being charged but enabling others to avoid prosecution. Bove suggested a recent report by special counsel Robert Hur that criticized President Joe Biden’s handling of classified information did not recommend charges proved his point about the lack of clarity.
When a law is unclear, Bove told Cannon, “The court’s obligation is to strike the statute and say ‘Congress, get it right.’”
Jay Bratt, another prosecutor with Smith’s team, disputed that there was anything unclear about the law, and Cannon pointedly noted that striking down a statute would be “quite an extraordinary step.”
In her subsequent ruling rejecting the defense request, she cited “still-fluctuating definitions of statutory terms/phrases” along with “disputed factual issues" that could be decided by a jury.
Trump is accused of intentionally holding onto some of the nation’s most sensitive documents at Mar-a-Lago — only returning a fraction of them upon demand by the National Archives. Prosecutors say he urged his lawyer to hide records and to lie to the FBI by saying he no longer was in possession of them and enlisted staff to delete surveillance footage that would show boxes of documents being moved around the property.
Cannon has suggested in the past that she sees Trump’s status as a former president as distinguishing him from others who have held onto classified records.
After the Trump team sued the Justice Department in 2022 to get his records back, Cannon appointed a special master to conduct an independent review of the documents taken during the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search. That appointment was later overturned by a federal appeals court.
On Thursday, she wrestled with the unprecedented nature of the case, noted that no former president had ever faced criminal jeopardy for mishandling classified information.
But, Bratt responded, “there was never a situation remotely similar to this one.”
Trump is separately charged in a federal case in Washington with conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Trump has argued in both federal cases that presidential immunity protects him from prosecution, though Cannon has not agreed to hear arguments on that claim in the documents case.
The U.S Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on Trump’s immunity claim in the election interference case next month.
___
Richer reported from Boston.
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In one scenario, Cannon asked them to craft jury instructions that assume the PRA allows presidents to designate any documents as personal at the end of a presidency — which is what Trump’s legal team has argued he had the authority to do. She then said they should also write separate jury instructions predicated on the idea that jurists would be able to determine which of the documents Trump is accused of illegally retaining are personal and which are presidential.
The government has said it is the Espionage Act — not the PRA — that guards classified materials. Trump is not charged with violating the PRA, and prosecutors said throughout their filing that the PRA should not be in those instructions.
“The PRA’s distinction between personal and presidential records has no bearing on whether a former President’s possession of documents containing national defense information is authorized under the Espionage Act, and the PRA should play no role in the jury instructions,” Smith wrote. “Indeed, based on the current record, the PRA should not play any role at trial at all.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/04/03/trump-documents-case-cannon-jack-smith/
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