9 months ago
Donald Trump is asking a federal judge in Florida to throw out his criminal case for hoarding classified secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate, offering a grab bag of arguments that the charges are legally faulty, that prosecutors have targeted him for political reasons and that the special counsel spearheading the case had no legal authority to bring it.
Trump’s lawyers filed seven motions late Thursday aimed at derailing the case, in which he is charged with willfully retaining classified information after he left office and obstructing a federal investigation into his possession of those secrets.
The motions include a contention that he’s immune from prosecution because he made the decision to send the highly sensitive documents to Mar-a-Lago while he was still president.
Trump also contends that he can’t be prosecuted because he was not impeached and convicted by Congress for the allegations now raised by special counsel Jack Smith. Congress, however, was unaware of his document trove for about a year after he left office.
In another motion, Trump says that under federal law he had total discretion to label the classified records as “personal,” removing them from the government’s possession and making them his own. And he argues that Smith’s appointment as special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland was improper in the first place.
All of these motions — and three others filed under seal — must be decided by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, whom Trump nominated in the closing months of his presidency. Cannon set Trump’s trial for May 20, but has since delayed many pretrial deadlines, leading to a widespread belief that she will ultimately postpone the proceedings. She is slated to hold a hearing in her Fort Pierce, Florida, courtroom next week about the trial schedule that will likely determine whether the former president will face a jury there this year.
Several arguments Trump and his co-defendants leveled Thursday remain secret for now. Cannon issued an order Tuesday instructing defense attorneys to file motions under seal if they contain any information that prosecutors or the defense consider confidential. Those arguments, which Trump provided broad outlines of in a public filing Thursday night, include claims of vindictive prosecution and an attempt to quash the warrant that authorized the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022.
While some arguments Trump is offering in the classified-documents case mirror those he used in an as-yet unsuccessful bid to dismiss a separate criminal case he faces in Washington related to his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, others he has not previously deployed.
In the election-focused case, his lawyers passed up a chance to argue that Smith's appointment was unconstitutional and violated Justice Department regulations, but they are now making that claim.
The filings also underscore the crosscurrents and tension among Trump’s myriad legal cases, both criminal and civil. In one of them, his attorneys repeatedly cite a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that Trump strenuously opposed — an opinion that found Trump could be sued over his actions on Jan. 6, 2021 — to argue that he’s entitled to a pretrial hearing on whether his decision to keep the sensitive documents was part of his official duties.
Trump’s argument that he can’t be charged because Congress never impeached or convicted him, however, conflicts with a separate ruling by the D.C. Circuit in his other federal case. There, a three-judge panel found that impeachment is not a necessary precursor to criminal charges for a former president. And in the Florida case, it’s even more tenuous because Congress had no awareness of the documents Trump retained until well after he left office.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys have been locked in a dispute over whether witness names and other sensitive information can be included in public filings. Prosecutors contend that identifying the witnesses publicly is likely to subject them to harassment and threats.
The judge hasn't definitively resolved that issue yet, so she ordered all submissions containing such information to be sealed in their entirety until she makes a decision on how much the public can see.
Cannon held a series of separate closed-door hearings with defense lawyers and prosecutors last week to discuss classified evidence in the case. She's also scheduled to discuss related issues with Trump's attorneys by phone Friday afternoon.
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