Hard to see Cannon revisiting the motion before witnesses for the gov. have testified.
Opening statement by the prosecution?
After presenting a summary of the charges the question "are these the actions of a man innocent of the charges, much less the actions of a former president with knowledge of the presidential records act, rather than an indication of a clear knowledge by the defendant that he has done something wrong and that movement & concealment of the docs was warranted, together with obstructive actions after receiving a subpoena for a search for the doc?'
In this photo illustration, pages are viewed from the unsealed federal indictment of former U.S. President Donald Trump on June 9, 2023, in Washington, DC.
Donald Trump isn’t the only person facing criminal charges over the classified documents fiasco: His longtime aide and “body man,” Walt Nauta, was also hit with six felony counts including obstruction of justice and making false statements to the FBI. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
By JOSH GERSTEIN
06/09/2023 06:53 PM EDT
Classified documents found in a shower. A clumsy effort to move boxes and hide them from the FBI. A damaging admission, caught on tape. And Donald Trump’s own public statements, used against him.
Those are some of the details in the indictment charging Trump and a longtime aide with an extraordinary scheme to hoard national secrets that Trump took to his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving the White House.
Here are some of the most notable revelations.
Showing off military plans On at least two occasions after leaving office, Trump displayed classified documents to others visiting him at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, the indictment alleges. In July 2021, Trump showed a writer, a publisher and two staff members a “plan of attack” that he said had been prepared for him by the U.S. military, the charges say. The audio-recorded meeting reportedly involved a document that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark Milley drafted about Iran.
Trump allegedly made a potentially damning admission at that session, saying he could have declassified the document while he was president but “now I can’t.”
A longtime aide turned co-conspirator Trump isn’t the only person facing criminal charges over the classified documents fiasco: His longtime aide and “body man,” Walt Nauta, was also hit with six felony counts including obstruction of justice and making false statements to the FBI. The indictment says Trump instructed Nauta to move boxes containing classified documents in order to conceal them from both Trump’s own lawyers and the FBI.
Prosecutors accused Nauta of lying months ago and pressured him to cooperate in the investigation, a person familiar with the situation said, but the charges unsealed Friday indicate that he and prosecutors didn’t come to terms on a deal — at least not yet.
Trump has railed at the FBI for spreading classified documents across the floor of a closet during a search of Mar-a-Lago last August. But prosecutors say Trump’s own storage of the documents was just as sloppy. The indictment says some of the classified records at Mar-a-Lago were stored in “a ballroom, a bathroom and shower [and] his bedroom.”
Spilling secrets, literally Other details from the indictment emphasize the haphazard nature with which sensitive government documents were strewn around the estate. The indictment alleges that, on at least one occasion in December 2021, boxes containing a mix of classified and unclassified records “spilled onto the floor” of a storage room. Helpfully for prosecutors, Nauta allegedly texted a photo of the scene to another Trump aide.
One of the documents, classified “Secret” and marked for release only to U.S. officials and close allies, discussed “military capabilities of a foreign country,” the indictment says.
Trump’s hands-on handling The indictment indicates that Trump was intimately involved in the handling of boxes brought from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, requesting some of them and sorting through the items after the National Archives pressured Trump aides to send the files back to Washington. In January 2022, Nauta suggested in a text message that Trump was upset that the boxes were labeled with too many details about their contents.
The message was sent just days before 15 boxes were dispatched from Mar-a-Lago to the National Archives. The FBI later concluded that the boxes contained 197 documents with classification markings.
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