FORT PIERCE, Florida, March 14 (Reuters) – A federal judge on Friday denied Donald Trump’s request to dismiss a criminal case that charges him with illegally holding onto classified documents.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida came just hours after a hearing in which his lawyers argued that the central charge in the case is improperly vague.
Cannon, who was appointed to her post by Trump, ruled that question “warrants serious consideration” but should not be decided at this point.
During the hearing, Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump near the end of his term, seemed skeptical about the assault on the statute. As Mr. Trump and Mr. Smith sat in front of her on opposite sides of the courtroom, she said it would be an “extraordinary” move for a judge to unilaterally strike down the Espionage Act, the chief federal law governing the handling of classified material. In her order, Judge Cannon acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s lawyers had raised “various arguments warranting serious consideration,” but she added that their concerns about the Espionage Act were better made in “connection with jury-instruction briefing.”
Mr. Trump’s lawyers raised another attack on the case during the hearing in Fort Pierce, asserting that under a law known as the Presidential Records Act, Mr. Trump designated the documents he took with him from the White House as his own personal property and so he could not be charged with possessing them without authorization.
Judge Cannon expressed deep reservations about that claim, too, noting that while Mr. Trump was free to argue at trial that the documents he was charged with holding on to actually belonged to him, it was “difficult to see” how the argument warranted tossing the entire case out before it went to a jury.
