BusinessInternational News
Trump’s classified-documents case dismissed by Judge Aileen Cannon
Trump’s classified-documents case dismissed by Judge Aileen Cannon
A judge on Monday dismissed the federal indictment against former president Donald Trump on charges of mishandling classified documents — his second seismic legal victory in less than a month, following a historic win before the Supreme Court.
The Justice Department is highly likely to appeal the decision, and the issue may eventually reach the Supreme Court. By dismissing the entire indictment, Cannon’s decision also means that the charges are dropped for Trump’s two co-defendants, Waltine “Walt” Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira.
Even if Cannon’s ruling is eventually overruled, the decision to dismiss Trump’s indictment adds to a string of legal victories for him in recent weeks, including a sweeping Supreme Court ruling July 1 that gives former presidents broad immunity for their official acts while in office.
On social media, Trump said Monday’s dismissal “should be just the first step” and that the rest of the criminal and civil cases against him also should be tossed out of court. He accused Democrats of conspiring against him to bring those cases, a claim that has been repeatedly denied by federal, state, and local officials.
“Let us come together to END all Weaponization of our Justice System,” he wrote.
His significant legal victory also comes less than 48 hours after he survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pa. After Cannon’s decision, one person who expected to have to testify in the documents case called Trump “the luckiest man on earth.” The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe candid feelings about the development.
Trump attorneys have long considered the classified documents case to be the strongest of the four criminal cases against him — in part because the acts in question mostly occurred after he left the White House — and it was the case that most worried them. The documents case has been particularly concerning to Trump advisers because if it ever does go to trial, it would feature first-person accounts from people in his inner orbit describing conversations with him.
The former president was charged with 40 counts of illegally retaining classified defense information and obstructing government efforts to retrieve the material. Some of the documents found in an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home and private club, contained information about top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them, The Washington Post reported last year.
Cannon’s opinion delves into the legal minutiae of special counsel regulations and does not address the crimes Trump and his co-defendants are accused of committing, or the merits of the evidence that prosecutors have collected.
The decision landed as Trump was preparing to be formally nominated as the Republican presidential candidate in the November election, with the Republican National Convention beginning in Milwaukee on Monday.
