A move to have some of the counts in the indictment dismissed has been turned down by the federal court overseeing the case involving the former president Trump and secret data.
More than half of the 41 counts in the indictment, which accuses the former commander in chief of illegally stockpiling confidential materials from his presidency and collaborating with others to hide important files from the federal government, were challenged by Trump’s defense team.
In an order released on Monday, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon stated that “the identified deficiencies, even if generating some arguable confusion, are either permitted by law, raise evidentiary challenges not appropriate for disposition at this juncture, and/or do not require dismissal even if technically deficient, so long as the jury is instructed appropriately and presented with adequate verdict forms as to each Defendants’ alleged conduct.” The defendants had challenged counts pertaining to obstruction and false statements.
Nonetheless, defense attorneys convinced Cannon to remove a paragraph from the indictment that contained biased material unrelated to the main counts.
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Several previous petitions to dismiss the case have already been denied by Cannon. One of these arguments claimed that the Presidential Records Act gave Trump permission to retain the documents after leaving the White House and to label them as personal files.
The move made on Monday to dismiss the six charges in the indictment is one of several pretrial motions and disagreements that have been piled up before Cannon for months, impeding the case’s development and postponing the trial.