Former President Trump is fighting legal issues from New York to Florida. All of them seem to be coming to a head as he ramps up his campaign to regain the White House.
Special counsel Jack Smith already appeared to be growing frustrated by the handling of the classified documents case and the pace toward trial.
In a filing this week, Smith accused Judge Aileen Cannon of handing Trump a “fundamentally flawed legal premise” that covered documents found at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Cannon asked both sides to propose jury instructions that would take into account Trump’s view on the Presidential Records Act (PRA), which dictates how records are handled, and later archived, after presidents leave office.
Authorities found boxes of documents, some classified, stored in unsecured areas in Trump’s resort.
Smith’s team argued that accepting Trump’s theory about his default declassification “would distort the trial.”
“The PRA’s distinction between personal and presidential records has no bearing on whether a former President’s possession of documents containing national defense information is authorized under the Espionage Act, and the PRA should play no role in the jury instructions,” prosecutors wrote in the filing. “Indeed, based on the current record, the PRA should not play any role at trial at all.”
The Espionage Act prohibits the willful retention of national defense information. The former president faces an obstruction of justice charge after he allegedly tried to conceal the records from authorities when they demanded he return them.
The Hill has a handy Trump case tracker to help keep you up on the latest developments in the cases the former president faces.
