Judge strikes down secret map paragraph from Trump’s indictment

Background: Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump attends a news conference with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., Friday, April 12, 2024, at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo /Wilfredo Lee)/ Aileen M. Cannon speaks remotely during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s oversight hearing on nominations to the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, July 29, 2020, in Washington, DC. (U.S. Senate via AP)

The judge in the Mar-a-Lago case on Monday ruled largely in favor of the special counsel, upholding Donald Trump’s Espionage Act indictment, but still struck at one “damaging” paragraph accusing the former president of showing a “secret map,” she expressed. also “concern” about Jack Smith’s approach in cases of “significant public interest”. To make matters worse, the defense immediately filed another motion to dismiss the case, but on different grounds, this time alleging that “the prosecution team destroyed exculpatory evidence.”

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, generally and substantively refused to dismiss the indictment against Trump, his butler Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira, even though the defense collectively argued that the indictment was on enough misconduct to warrant dismissal.

Cannon ruled that “identified deficiencies, even if they cause some arguable confusion, are either permitted by law, constitute a basis for challenging evidence inappropriate for resolution at this stage, and/or do not require dismissal, even if they demonstrate technical deficiencies, as long as the jury are duly instructed and produced with the appropriate judgment forms relating to the alleged conduct of each defendant.”

Still, the judge disagreed with paragraph 36 of the indictment, found it improper and reserved judgment on “potentially privileged information contained in the superseding indictment,” noting that Trump separately sought to suppress those details.

“Defendants also vigorously challenge the inclusion in the superseding indictment of material information that Defendant Trump claims is protected under the attorney-client privilege and/or work product,” the footnote reads. “Because this issue is the subject of a pending motion to dismiss, the Court decides to reserve judgment on the potential impact of these allegations.”

Paragraph 36 of the superseding indictment alleges an incident that occurred in 2021, months into Trump’s presidency, when he showed a “secret map” to a representative of a political action committee at his New Jersey club, apparently to criticize President Joe’s troop withdrawal Biden from Afghanistan, an exit that led to the death of 13 U.S. service members in a suicide bomb attack in Kabul as evacuation efforts continued.

“During the meeting, TRUMP commented that the ongoing military operation in Country B is not going well. “TRUMP showed the PAC representative a secret map of Country B and told the PAC representative that he should not show the map to the PAC representative and not get too close,” the indictment reads. “The PAC representative did not have a security clearance or any classified information requiring knowledge of the military operation.”

Cannon decided that this paragraph should not be included in the indictment. While she expressed “concern” over the special counsel’s “decision to include in the charging document an extensive narrative account of his view of the facts, especially on matters of significant public interest,” she did not hand the defense a major victory.

“Notwithstanding these concerns, given the stringent standards for applying Rule 7(d), the Court, with one exception below, in the exercise of its discretion, does not order ‘strikes’ on the defenses sought by Defendants, at least not at this stage because Defendants “have not clearly demonstrated that the impugned allegations are completely irrelevant or prejudicial,” the judge wrote.

However, when one rejection request fails, another one appears to take its place.

On Monday, Trump’s defense additionally demanded that Cannon dismiss the indictment and “block all evidence seized” by the FBI during the August 2022 Mar-a-Lago search, claiming that the feds destroyed “important exculpatory evidence regarding the location of the allegedly secret documents at issue.” only for photos to leak of secret documents strewn across the floor.

Federal prosecutors say FBI agents seized the materials from Mar-a-Lago. The content of the documents has been edited in white squares. (Photo from federal court filing August 31, 2022)

The motion, alleging tampering with evidence and violating Trump’s due process rights, alleged that Jack Smith was assisting President Biden in his “election interference mission”:

The prosecution team destroyed exculpatory evidence, one of the most basic defenses President Trump has in response to the politically charged allegations in this case. The Office of the Special Counsel wrongly alleged that President Trump had knowledge of the contents of the August 2022 boxes, which were packed by others in the White House and transported to Florida in January 2021. The fact that allegedly secret documents were buried in the boxes and mixed with President Trump’s personal effects from his first term strongly supported the defense argument that he lacked knowledge and culpable criminal intent regarding the documents in question. Any proximity to allegedly secret documents and other dated pre-move material, such as letters and newspapers, would further strengthen this argument. The prosecution team’s instructions to agents who carried out the raid generally confirmed these proposals and directed agents to take care to document the location of both the seized items and potentially privileged materials.

However, the agents ignored these instructions. The government was more interested in staging and leaking manipulated photos to the press than in preserving key exculpatory evidence that was now lost forever.

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