BY ERIC TUCKER
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge refused Thursday to throw
out the classified documents prosecution against Donald Trump, turning aside
defense arguments that a decades-old law permitted the former president to
retain the records after he left office.
Lawyers for Trump, in asking for the case to be tossed out,
had cited a 1978 statute known as the Presidential Records Act in arguing that
he was permitted to designate records from his time in office as personal and
take them with him when he left the White House.
Prosecutors on special counsel Jack Smith’s team vigorously
challenged that argument, saying the statute had no relevance in a case
concerning classified documents and there was no legal basis for Trump to hold
onto top-secret information.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who heard arguments on
the matter last month, rejected the Trump team’s arguments in a three-order.
She wrote that the 40-count indictment against Trump makes “no reference to the
Presidential Records Act, nor do they rely on that
statute for purposes of stating an offense.”
Cannon also defended an order from last month that asked
lawyers for both sides to formulate potential jury instructions and to respond
to two different scenarios in which she appeared to be entertaining Trump’s
presidential records argument. The order drew a sharp rebuke from Smith’s team,
which in a filing this week called the premises she laid out “fundamentally
flawed.”
“The Court’s order soliciting preliminary draft instructions
on certain counts should not be misconstrued as declaring a final definition on
any essential element or asserted defense in this case,” Cannon wrote. “Nor
should it be interpreted as anything other than what it was: a genuine attempt,
in the context of the upcoming trial, to better understand the parties’
competing positions and the questions to be submitted to the jury in this
complex case of first impression.”
The ruling Thursday is the second time in as many months
that the judge has denied one of Trump’s motions to drop the case. In March,
she spurned an argument that the statute underpinning the bulk of the charges
was unconstitutionally vague and therefore required the dismissal of the
indictment.
Cannon has yet to rule on other Trump efforts to dismiss the case, including arguments that presidential immunity shields him from prosecution and that he has been subject to “selective and vindictive prosecution.”