Federal Judge REMOVES Part of Indictment, Then DENIES Trump’s Request

Monday was not your usual day in court.

Judge Aileen Cannon rejects Trump's bid to dismiss counts in classified documents indictment. https://t.co/Wa6oCMJWcs

— ABC News (@ABC) June 11, 2024

👀👀👀

Judge Aileen Cannon just denied Donald Trump and Walt Nauta’s motion to dismiss the classified documents case.

🍿 pic.twitter.com/Dn1vzSdBbs

— Art Candee 🍿🥤 (@ArtCandee) June 10, 2024

Associated Press reports:

The federal judge presiding over the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump and two of his associates struck a paragraph from the indictment on Monday but denied a defense request to dismiss some of the charges.

The paragraph concerns allegations that Trump, in 2021 while no longer president, showed a classified 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 on Monday agreed that the language’s inclusion 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 actual charges in the indictment. But even as she did that, she chided special counsel Jack Smith’s team for having included in the indictment language that she said was “legally unnecessary to serve the function of an indictment” and for creating “arguable confusion” in the allegations.

The motion to dismiss the counts is one of multiple pretrial requests and disputes that for months have piled up before Cannon, snarling the progress of the case and prompting the judge last month to indefinitely postpone a trial that had been set for May 20 in Fort Pierce, Fla.

She has scheduled additional arguments for later this month, including on a Trump challenge to the legality and funding of the Justice Department’s appointment of Smith as special counsel last year.

The delays are all the more startling given that many legal experts had seen the classified documents case as exceedingly straightforward in its allegations that Trump had illegally hoarded classified documents from his presidency at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., and obstructed FBI efforts to get them back.

The prosecution is one of four criminal cases Trump is facing as he seeks to reclaim the White House.

The defendants in this particular motion had sought to throw out more than a half-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 conceal the sensitive files from the government.