The federal judge presiding over the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump and two of his associates struck a paragraph from the indictment on Monday but denied a defense request to dismiss some of the charges.
The paragraph concerns allegations that Trump, in 2021 while no longer president, showed a classified map of a foreign country to a representative of his political action committee while discussing a military operation that he said was not going well.
Defense lawyers said the paragraph was prejudicial because it included information that was not irrelevant to the indictment, which accuses Trump of illegally retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, and U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon on Monday agreed that the language’s inclusion in charging documents was “not appropriate.”
She left the rest of the indictment intact, denying in her 14-page order a defense request to dismiss actual charges in the indictment. But even as she did that, she chided special counsel Jack Smith’s team for having included in the indictment language that she said was “legally unnecessary to serve the function of an indictment” and for creating “arguable confusion” in the allegations.
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