The federal judge overseeing the criminal case of misuse of confidential federal documents against Donald Trump and his two Florida co-defendants has denied efforts to dismiss all but 10 of the 41 counts in the indictment against them on technical grounds.
District Judge Aileen Cannon, however, agreed with the defendants that some of the language in the indictment was “legally unnecessary” and ruled that one of the paragraphs would be removed from the indictment.
In a small victory for the defense, Cannon rejected prosecutors’ justification for including a paragraph in the charges that described an episode in which Trump allegedly showed an unidentified representative of his political organization a classified map and then claimed that he had not the right to show the document.
Prosecutors pointed to a procedural rule that allows the admission of evidence related to uncharged conduct. However, Cannon said Monday that such evidence should be subjected to certain pre-trial litigation before being allowed into a case.
In explaining this decision, she criticized prosecutors for using a so-called oral accusation, that is, an accusation that goes beyond the meager legal requirements for accusing someone and providing a more complete narrative of the allegations.
Cannon noted in his order that “the risks that may arise from a prosecutor’s decision to include in a charging document an extensive narrative account of his or her view of the facts, especially in cases of significant public interest.”
Although Trump and his co-defendants raised several other technical issues they saw in the charges, including issues of duplicity, the judge concluded that these “identified deficiencies, even if they generate some arguable confusion, are permitted by law, raise evidentiary challenges, and are not appropriate to available at this time.”
Cannon also said that as long as the jury was “properly instructed and presented with adequate verdict forms as to the alleged conduct of each defendant,” there would be no problem.
Source: CNN Brasil
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