Federal prosecutors have rebuked the judge who handled former President Trump’s classified documents case in the Southern District of Florida, saying her potential jury instructions were a “fundamentally flawed legal premise.” claimed to be based on.
In a court filing Tuesday, Smith said U.S. District Judge Eileen Cannon’s unusual request for prosecutors and defense attorneys to provide hypothetical instructions to the jury is “erroneous” and would “distort” the trial. He said it was a thing. The judge asked his lawyers to present two different scenarios that would accept Mr. Trump’s argument that he has a right to keep classified documents under the Presidential Records Act, and Mr. Trump now faces criminal charges.
Smith argued that the Presidential Records Act was not relevant to Trump’s case, telling the judge that under the Espionage Act, the former Republican president had to keep highly classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago hotel in Florida when he left office. He said he was not authorized to bring it into his home. White House.
“Both scenarios are based on an unstated and fundamentally flawed legal premise, namely that the Presidential Records Act (“PRA”), specifically the distinction between “personal” and “presidential” records, is It is to decide whether the president is “president.”[a]”Under the Espionage Act, he is authorized to possess highly classified documents and store them in an unsafe facility,” Smith wrote.
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Former Republican presidential candidate Trump speaks at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin on April 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Mike Romer)
Prosecutors have argued that the documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago in the 2022 FBI investigation were not personal and said there is no evidence that President Trump legally designated them. They claim that Trump only “made up” his claims after his possession of these documents became public knowledge, and that none of the witnesses interviewed for the Smith investigation supported the president’s claims. He said he had not.
“President Trump’s designation of the records as personal and his deletion of the records at the time that led to the box’s transfer to Mar-a-Lago make the records private under the law.” “Not a single person I heard from believed this was tantamount to designation as a PRA,” prosecutors wrote. “On the contrary, all the witnesses who were asked this question had never heard of such a thing.”
Mr. Smith warned that if Mr. Cannon proceeded with the instructions given by the jury, the prosecution would appeal.
Prosecutors are increasingly dissatisfied with Cannon’s handling of the Trump case.
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Former President Trump and Special Counsel Jack Smith (Getty Images/File)
Judges appointed by President Trump have not yet ruled on multiple defense motions to dismiss the charges or disagreements between the two sides, and a trial date has not yet been set. This suggests that criminal cases in which they claimed to have evidence may remain unresolved. By the presidential election in November.
Cannon, who had previously faced intense criticism over Trump’s decision to grant an independent arbitrator’s request to review documents obtained in the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid, announced last month that Trump’s case He heard arguments on two motions to dismiss. The Presidential Records Act allows him to designate documents as personal, allowing them to be preserved as such.
Last month, a judge ruled that former President Trump’s argument “may have some persuasive force in court, but I don’t see how it would lead to a rejection,” citing “unconstitutional ambiguity.” Trump’s motion to dismiss the charges was denied.
The judge said at one point that Trump’s legal team’s position on the Presidential Records Act essentially “eviscerates the PRA” and gives the president unfettered power to classify presidential records as clearly personal. Ta.
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This sketch shows former President Trump in a federal courthouse in Fort Pierce, Florida, on March 14, 2024. Trump’s lawyers are asking Judge Eileen Cannon to dismiss special counsel Jack Smith’s charges regarding Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents. (Lotor Speer)
Days after the decision, Cannon asked prosecutors and defense attorneys to draft jury instructions that responded to this premise: “The president is the only person during his presidential term to classify records as personal or presidential records.” “No court or jury has the authority to make or consider such classification decisions.” ”
Her premise was that the outgoing president’s decision to exclude personal records from those returned to the government “constitutes a personal classification by the president of those records under the PRA.”
Prosecutors said this interpretation of the law was incorrect. They also asked Cannon to quickly deny the defense’s remaining motions to dismiss.
“The PRA’s distinction between personal records and presidential records has no bearing on whether possession of documents containing national defense information of a former president is permissible under the Espionage Act, and the PRA does not apply to jury instructions regarding the elements of section 793.” should not play any role,” Smith’s team argued.
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“Indeed, based on the current record, the PRA should not play any role in the trial,” they added.
The documents case is one of four pending criminal cases against Trump. He pleaded not guilty to all of them.
Fox News Digital’s Jake Gibson, Heather Lacy, Bradford Betz and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
