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Judge rejects bid by Donald Trump to throw out classified documents case on constitutional grounds

By ERIC TUCKER, ALANNA DURKIN RICHER and TERRY SPENCER
Updated 5:36 PM CDT, March 14, 2024

FORT PIERCE, Fla. (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday rejected one bid by Donald Trump to throw out out his classified documents criminal case, .. https://apnews.com/article/trump-justice-department-indictment-classified-documents-miami-8315a5b23c18f27083ed64eef21efff3
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.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-indicted-jan-6-investigation-special-counsel-debb59bb7a4d9f93f7e2dace01feccdc

Donald Trump is facing four criminal indictments, and a civil lawsuit. You can track all of the cases here.
https://projects.apnews.com/features/2023/trump-investigations-civil-criminal-tracker/index.html

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.
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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.

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https://apnews.com/article/trump-classified-documents-maralago-presidential-records-200d4c73d7c7dd75d9c9d878b77d05ce