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Judge says tossing out Espionage Act in Trump case would be 'extraordinary step'

Former president Donald Trump is in federal court in Florida, where his lawyers are arguing that his classified documents charges should be dismissed.

By Perry Stein, Devlin Barrett | 2024-03-14

Former president Donald Trump arrives at the courthouse in Fort Pierce, Fla., on Thursday. (Marco Bello/Reuters)

FORT PIERCE, Fla. -- Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump listened carefully in court Thursday as his lawyers tried to convince a federal judge that the laws about classified documents are so vaguely worded, the criminal charges against him should be dismissed.

U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon heard two hours of legal jousting between prosecutor Jay Bratt and defense lawyer Emil Bove, who argued the language of the World War I-era Espionage Act that Trump is charged with breaking is too unclear to be the basis of an indictment against the 45th president of the United States. For most of the morning session, Cannon seemed to take the argument seriously. Toward the end, however, she hinted at an underlying skepticism toward Trump's request.

"You would agree that declaring a statute is unconstitutionally vague is quite an extraordinary step?" Cannon asked Bove.

As a judge overseeing the first-of-its kind case, in which a former president is charged with dozens of counts of violating national security laws by stashing classified documents at his home after he left the White House, Cannon has been careful not to say too much about her thinking in these pretrial hearings.

She has made clear the scheduled late-May trial date will be delayed but has yet to rule on a new date; prosecutors have asked for the trial to start July 8, while Trump's lawyers have argued it should be after the November election, or in August at the earliest.

On Thursday morning, just over a day after winning enough delegates to clinch the 2024 Republican nomination, Trump appeared attentive and relaxed in court, often chatting at the defense table with one of his other lawyers, Todd Blanche, while Bratt and Bove answered Cannon's questions.

Cannon is set to hold the second part of the hearing Thursday afternoon, to discuss Trump's claim that the Presidential Records Act should be grounds for the dismissal of charges that he mishandled national defense information. Trump insists that the law, which governs historical papers, means that he can declare even highly classified documents to be his own personal property.

The 1978 Presidential Records Act was passed after President Richard M. Nixon sought to destroy White House tapes during the Watergate scandal. It says presidential records belong to the public and are to be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration at the end of a presidency. The act also covers vice-presidential records and applies to classified documents, which are also governed by other laws.

Trump's lawyers argued in a 17-page filing last month that as president, he had "virtually unreviewable" authority to designate presidential records as personal ones. The National Archives, they claim, has authority over only presidential records -- not personal ones -- and therefore had no right to demand that he return the materials.

Trump's legal team also argues that the responsibility to recover presidential documents falls to the Archives, as a civil matter, and that the records agency should not have referred the matter to the Justice Department for potential criminal prosecution.

Lawyers working for special counsel Jack Smith said Trump's reading of the PRA is wrong and relies on the faulty view that "as a former president, the Nation's laws and principles of accountability that govern every other citizen do not apply to him."

The materials Trump allegedly took from the White House are "indisputably presidential, not personal," prosecutors wrote in a court filing, adding that even if Trump did designate the material as personal, the PRA would still not apply to classified information found at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home and private club.

"Nothing in the PRA leaves it to a President to make unilateral, unreviewable, and perpetually binding decisions to remove presidential records from the White House in a manner that thwarts the operation of the PRA -- a statute designed to ensure that presidential records are the property of the United States and that they are preserved for the people," the 20-page filing said.

Barrett reported from Washington.

This is a developing story. It will be updated.


This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/03/14/trump-cannon-hearing-espionage-act-pra/


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