Prosecutors in Trump’s classified documents case rebuke judge’s unusual and ‘flawed’ order

Federal prosecutors chided the judge presiding over former President Trump’s classified documents case in Florida, warning her off potential jury instructions that they said rest on a “fundamentally flawed legal premise.” In an unusual order, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon had asked prosecutors and defense lawyers to formulate proposed jury instructions for most of the charges even though it remains unclear when the case might reach trial. The order surprised legal experts and alarmed special counsel Jack Smith’s team, which said in a filing late Tuesday that the 1978 law — which requires presidents to return presidential records to the government upon leaving office but permits them to retain purely personal ones — has no relevance in a case concerning highly classified documents like the ones Trump is alleged to have stored at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. Those records, prosecutors said, were clearly not personal and there is no evidence Trump ever designated them as such. Cannon, who earlier faced blistering criticism over her decision to grant Trump’s request for an independent arbiter to review documents obtained during an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, heard arguments last month on two of Trump’s motions to dismiss the case, including that the Presidential Records Act permitted him to designate the documents as personal and that he was therefore permitted to retain them. “The PRA’s distinction between personal and presidential records has no bearing on whether a former President’s possession of documents containing national defense information is authorized under the Espionage Act, and the PRA should play no role in the jury instructions on the elements of Section 793,” they said, citing the statute that makes it a crime to illegally retain national defense information.