March 14 - Trump classified documents case updates

Our coverage for the day has ended. Follow the latest on the classified documents case here. 

The judge presiding over the classified documents case in Florida denied Donald Trump’s motion to dismiss charges based on unconstitutional vagueness.

Just hours before her ruling, Judge Aileen Cannon heard arguments in a Fort Pierce courtroom over Trump’s motion, where his attorneys said the law that prosecutors used to charge him for allegedly retaining national defense records without authorization was too vague to be used against him.

“Although the Motion raises various arguments warranting serious consideration, the Court ultimately determines, following lengthy oral argument, that resolution of the overall question presented depends too greatly on contested instructional questions about still-fluctuating definitions of statutory terms/phrases as charged,” Cannon wrote.

Cannon noted in her denial that the issue of the potential vagueness of the statue would be better brought “with jury-instruction briefing and/or other appropriate motions” instead of in Trump’s motion to dismiss charges.

Cannon has not ruled on Trump’s motion to dismiss based on his argument that he had the authority as president to declare documents as his “personal” records – or on any of his other motions to dismiss the case.

US District Court Judge Aileen Cannon on Thursday declined to toss out the classified documents case against Donald Trump after hours-long arguments in part over whether the charges against the former president were too vague.

Before the judge were two of the nine motions to dismiss that the defendants have filed in the case. Cannon first heard Trump’s claim that the law prosecutors used to charge him for allegedly retaining national defense records without authorization was too vague to be used against him. Fewer than three hours after the hearing, Cannon rejected that claim.

Trump’s second motion argued that the Presidential Records Act – which governs how White House records are handled by an outgoing administration – required that the case be thrown out. Cannon hasn’t yet ruled on the second claim.

The judge, however, expressed skepticism during the hearing toward both requests for the charges to be dismissed, and she suggested that some of the issues the Trump legal team was raising would be better left to a jury to consider.

Here are key takeaways from Thursday’s hearing:

Throwing out charges because law was vague would be ‘extraordinary,’ judge says: The morning session was focused on Trump’s ultimately rejected argument that the law prohibiting the unlawful retention of national defense information was too ambiguous to be applied to his alleged conduct. Cannon said it would be an “extraordinary step” for her to throw out those charges on the basis that they were unconstitutionally vague.

Cannon: Trump’s arguments would “gut” the Presidential Records Act: The judge was similarly skeptical of the second Trump request being argued Thursday: that, because he has supposedly unlimited power to decide which documents from his White House were personal, the case against him should be dismissed. Cannon said that Trump’s lawyers were making some “forceful” arguments his ability to designate the records as personal by taking them to his Mar-a-Lago resort at the end of his presidency.

Cannon said some of Trump’s concerns should be up to the jury: The judge repeatedly said Thursday that some of Trump’s arguments are best suited for a jury to decide during his eventual trial. On multiple occasions, Cannon pushed Trump’s attorneys over whether their arguments – specifically that Trump didn’t know he was breaking the law when he took documents to Mar-a-Lago – were “premature.” Cannon said, however, that the arguments could be a “forceful” trial defense, signaling she is sympathetic to some of the former president’s complaints about the criminal case.

Read up on more takeaways from the Florida hearing.

Lawyers for Donald Trump were in court today, arguing that the criminal case concerning the former president’s handling of classified documents should be dismissed.

It is one of four criminal cases Trump faces, while he also juggles being the Republican presumptive nominee for president. The former president is now facing 88 charges over the four criminal indictments in Georgia, New York, Washington, DC, and Florida. Trump has pleaded not guilty to every charge in these cases.

Here’s a recap of each case and where things stand:

Read more about the four criminal cases Trump faces.

In a separate case that Donald Trump is facing, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office said it is willing to delay the former president’s criminal hush money trial for up to 30 days, according to a court filing.

The trial is currently scheduled to start on March 25. The potential delay throws the date for what’s supposed to be the former president’s first criminal trial into question, a surprise twist that represents a major boost for Trump – whose defense teams have employed a strategy of consistently trying to delay all of his trials past the election.

Trump is facing criminal charges in four distinct cases, but until Thursday, the New York case was the only one with a clear trial date. The federal election subversion case is on hold until the Supreme Court hears Trump’s immunity claims next month, while Trump’s lawyers are pushing to delay his classified documents mishandling trial in Florida until August or even beyond the election.

And in Georgia, a judge is set to rule within days on whether to disqualify the Fulton County district attorney who is prosecuting the former president over his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election there, which could throw that entire case into doubt.

More about the New York case: Trump was charged by the District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office last year with 34 counts of falsifying business records. The charges stem from reimbursements made to Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen for hush money payments he made before the 2016 election to an adult film star alleging an affair with Trump. The former president has pleaded not guilty and denied the affair.

The proposed delay in the New York trial is in order to give Trump’s lawyers time to review new materials turned over by federal prosecutors this week, the DA’s office said.

Lawyers for Donald Trump are pushing a series of arguments for why the judge overseeing the case concerning the former president’s handling of classified documents should order the case to be dismissed. Some of those arguments include that Trump is shielded by presidential immunity and that his handling of classified material is allowed under the Presidential Records Act.

What the Presidential Records Act says: The key sentence is, “Upon the conclusion of a President’s term of office, or if a President serves consecutive terms upon the conclusion of the last term, the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President.”

One section of the law lays out a process of communication between a sitting president and NARA’s chief archivist for instances in which the president wants to dispose of personal records, which are defined as records of “a purely private or nonpublic character” unrelated to the president’s official duties. 

Another section of the law allows a president, before leaving office, to restrict access to some records (including personnel files and medical files, advice from aides, trade secrets and certain defense information) for up to 12 years — though these records must still be in NARA custody during the temporary restricted period.

Neither of these sections of the act is relevant to Trump’s case because:

Trump was an ex-president He possessed indisputably official records Those official records were on his own property, outside of NARA custody He did not return these records even upon repeated NARA requests and a Justice Department subpoena

David Harbach, a prosecutor with the special counsel, argued in court that the classified information found at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence were “nowhere near personal,” as the former president has claimed. 

Pushing back against Trump’s arguments that the Presidential Records Act (PRA) authorized him to keep documents after leaving the White House, Harbach said that the law doesn’t give presidents “carte blanche” to improperly designate records as personal.

It would be “absurd,” Harbach said, if the National Archives couldn’t seek the Justice Department’s help after finding a “boatload” of classified records in boxes returned from Mar-a-Lago, which raised concern more classified material remained at the Florida estate. The FBI later searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and found more.

And, Harbach added, even if the records were considered his personal documents under the PRA, as Trump has argued, the PRA “says zero, zip on classified information.”

Former presidents shouldn’t have a “permanent exemption for all time” to classification rules, Harbach said.

Judge Aileen Cannon wrapped up the hearing Thursday without a ruling on two of Donald Trump’s motions to dismiss the classified documents case against him.

The federal judge said from the bench in Florida that she would take the motions “under advisement” and would be ruling on the two motions “promptly.”

There are nine total motions to dismiss, and Cannon has not set additional hearings on any of the other motions to dismiss.

Judge Aileen Cannon expressed skepticism toward former President Donald Trump’s argument that the classified documents case should be dismissed under the Presidential Records Act (PRA), which Trump has claimed allowed him to make the documents his personal papers.

Cannon showed some openness to the idea that Trump had the power to designate the records as personal and take them to Mar-a-Lago at the end of his presidency. She said that argument was “forceful” but suggested it was a question for a jury to consider during trial.

“Your arguments might have some force, again, as it comes to a trial defense,” Cannon said, referring to arguments from Trump’s attorneys that other executives have retained presidential documents.

But, Cannon said, the defense’s arguments would effectively “gut the PRA altogether” and allow future presidents to say clearly presidential documents are personal — an argument the Justice Department has made in court papers in the case.

Cannon has now expressed skepticism about both of Trump’s two motions to dismiss that are being discussed Thursday.

Donald Trump’s lawyers are arguing two main points about why the case concerning the former president’s handling of classified documents should be thrown out.

Whether the law was clear enough for Trump to know that he was doing something illegal when he took documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago. Trump’s lawyers have been arguing that the charges are “unconstitutionally vague” in court this morning. The second argument that will come up next is whether the documents were Trump’s personal records. The Department of Justice has argued that the documents did not belong to Trump, pointing out that some of them were classified and dealt with national security information.

These motions to dismiss the case will take the judge a while for Cannon to work through. 

“They write long opinions,” Katelyn Polantz, CNN’s senior crime and justice reporter, explained, referring to judges considering these types of arguments.

That means there is a long way to go. Cannon is also reconsidering the trial start date which was initially set for late May. 

During the morning session of today’s hearing in the classified documents case, Donald Trump’s presence was only acknowledged once at the beginning of the proceedings during a roll call.

While Trump largely sat with his hands clasped or arms crossed, as the hearing progressed, he began whispering things to one of his attorneys, Todd Blanche, who would often chuckle or smile as he listened to the former president.

There is no audio or video from the courtroom available to the public.

Judge Aileen Cannon said it would be an “extraordinary step” for her to throw out the Mar-a-Lago documents case, as former President Donald Trump is requesting, on the basis that the relevant law is “unconstitutionally vague.”

The two hours of oral arguments Thursday morning focused on the unconstitutional vagueness request.

Trump is arguing that the law undergirding 32 counts of the indictment — prohibiting the unlawful retention of national defense information — is too ambiguous to be applied to his alleged conduct.

Towards the end of the morning arguments, Cannon told Trump attorney Emile Bove, “You understand, of course, that finding a statute unconstitutionally vague is an extraordinary step.”

Bove responded: “I understand that it is significant, but it’s warranted here.”

Trump’s claims that the Presidential Records Act requires the case to be dismissed will be argued in the afternoon.

The hearing on Donald Trump’s motions to dismiss the charges against him for mishandling classified documents has broken for lunch. It will resume at 1:15 pm. ET.

Donald Trump’s attorneys have repeatedly raised the special counsel probe into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified information, saying that Biden has previously kept documents and wasn’t prosecuted.

Judge Aileen Cannon followed up on that at Thursday’s hearing, asking special counsel Jack Smith’s office about others presidents facing criminal exposure for their handling of classified material.

Prosecutor Jay Bratt said that the National Archives referred Biden’s and former Vice President Mike Pence’s handling of classified documents to the Justice Department several years ago. Neither Pence nor Biden were prosecuted for classified documents found in their possession after leaving office.

Bratt stressed that the circumstances around Trump were unique and that no other president has faced criminal charges.

Bratt added that he didn’t “have insight” into special counsel Robert Hur’s report in the Biden investigation, which concluded without charges.

Prosecutor Jay Bratt read a transcript of Donald Trump discussing classified documents at his Bedminster Club in New Jersey in court Thursday to show that the former president “never” deemed classified records personal. 

Judge Aileen Cannon asked Bratt whether Trump’s challenge to the indictment under the Presidential Records Act is “premature.” The former president has argued he was allowed to take documents from the White House as his personal records.

“Not only is it premature, it never happened,” Bratt said.

Reading from the transcript, part of which was included in the indictment, Bratt emphasized that Trump discussed the documents as highly sensitive. 

“He doesn’t say there, ‘I can show you this because it’s personal,’” Bratt said. “In fact, he’s saying the opposite.”

As Bratt recounted the Bedminster exchange between Trump, aides and a ghostwriter for Mark Meadows in 2021, Trump leaned back in his seat with his arms crossed.

In a hearing today on efforts by Donald Trump to get charges stemming from his handling of classified documents dismissed, Judge Aileen Cannon repeatedly asked lawyers for the former president whether their arguments are “premature.”

Cannon zeroed in on Trump attorney Emil Bove’s claim that Trump designated the records as personal when he took the documents with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago at the end of his term.

Cannon suggested that there is a factual dispute over whether the documents were designated as personal with that move and questioned several times if the motion was “premature.” Her line of questioning suggests she’s weighing whether the issue would be better addressed later in the proceedings, perhaps at trial.

Bove said it was not too soon to discuss the matter and argued that Trump’s designation of documents was a matter of legal interpretation for a judge to decide, not a factual dispute.

Former President Donald Trump is currently in court in Florida for a hearing over this alleged mishandling of classified documents. This case is one of four criminal cases Trump is facing, although it’s unclear when it will go to trial.

Here’s what to know about this case:

President Joe Biden will visit the private home of one of his supporters in Saginaw, Michigan, on Thursday and participate in a campaign organizing meeting there as he works to build out his reelection infrastructure in a key battleground state.

The visit to Saginaw comes amid a blitz of campaign travel for Biden as the general election gets underway. In the past week, he’ll have made stops in Pennsylvania, Georgia, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Michigan, with more travel planned over the coming days.

In each place, he’s paid special attention to the on-the-ground organization that his campaign says is ramping up as the rematch with Donald Trump gets underway.

The president’s campaign recently said it was hiring 350 new staffers and opening 100 new offices as part of a month-long ramp-up of operations. They say Biden and other top officials, including the vice president, are “engaging the grassroots army that will deliver us to victory in November.”

In Saginaw, with a high concentration of Black and Latino voters, Biden hopes to reconstitute the coalition that helped propel him to the White House in 2020.

He’ll deliver remarks laying out “the stark contrast between his agenda of lowering costs for Michiganders and Donald Trump’s attacks on working families in the state,” according to a campaign official.

Vice President Kamala Harris, meanwhile, is scheduled to visit a Planned Parenthood clinic in Minnesota on Thursday as the Biden-Harris campaign continues to highlight an issue — reproductive rights — that the campaign believes will galvanize moderate voters in November.

Harris’ visit is believed to be the first by a sitting president or vice president to an abortion provider.

While a judge in Florida hears arguments to dismiss charges in the classified documents case against Donald Trump, the presiding judge in the former president’s Georgia election subversion case says he is on track to order this week on whether to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

McAfee told the court at the end of the Willis disqualification hearings on March 1 that he would take at least two weeks to decide Willis’ fate prosecuting the case against former President Donald Trump and 14 of his co-defendants.  

Trump and others in the case are seeking to disqualify Willis after accusing her of financially benefiting by hiring her special prosecutor in the case, Nathan Wade, with whom she became romantically involved.

“I am calling as best I can and the law as I understand it. So, I still feel like I’m on track to having that done by the deadline that I put on myself,” McAfee said in an interview last week on WSB Radio in Atlanta

Former President Donald Trump’s motorcade has arrived at the courthouse in Fort Pierce, Florida, for the 10 a.m. ET hearing in the classified documents case.

What today’s hearing is all about: Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the case, has set apart an entire day to hear arguments on whether the prosecution should be thrown out on the basis of Trump’s claims about his presidential classification powers.

Trump and special counsel Jack Smith will have the chance to debate in court Trump’s most-cited legal argument in the classified documents case against him: whether as president, he was allowed to keep any documents he wanted.

Trump’s legal team have argued in several court filings that charges against the former president should be dismissed because, they claim, Trump had unfettered authority as president to decide what documents from his time in the White House he could keep as his personal records.

CNN’s Holmes Lybrand, Hannah Rabinowitz and Tierney Sneed contributed reporting to this post. 

Donald Trump looks like he’s succeeding in running out the clock.

The former president’s common strategy across his four criminal trials is to use the constitutional protections granted by a legal system he claims is corrupt to push the moment he will stand before a jury until after the election in November.

Trump has long been an expert in tying the courts in knots by exhausting every single avenue of appeal – often using fanciful legal strategies that nevertheless take time to litigate – to postpone accountability.

The technique will be on display on Thursday when Trump’s lawyers challenge the legality of special counsel Jack Smith’s case against the presumptive Republican nominee over his hoarding of classified documents at his Florida resort, with Trump expected to be in attendance.

Judge Aileen Cannon will hear Trump’ motions seeking the dismissal of the case, partly based on his argument that he was entitled to take classified documents to his residence. He is also claiming that he is the victim of selective prosecution and was treated differently than other senior officials who had classified material – like President Joe Biden – despite clear differences in their cases. And, as in other courtroom dramas, he’s making a sweeping claim of presidential immunity in keeping with his apparent belief that the nation’s highest office put him above the law.

Cannon is also currently weighing a postponement of the late May start to the trial that would play into Trump’s attempts to prevent it from beginning before November.

Read Collinson’s full analysis of Trump’s legal strategy.

Former President Donald Trump has secured enough delegates to become the Republican presumptive presidential nominee.

As he moves ahead to the November rematch against President Joe Biden, Trump is also juggling a busy election calendar and multiple legal events related to the four criminal indictments he faces.

He is expected to be in court in Florida for a hearing related to the classified documents case against him and others.

Here’s a look at how his colliding calendar is shaping up so far:

A Florida judge overseeing the case against former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents has set apart an entire day on Thursday to hear arguments on whether the case should be thrown out. His lawyers are expected to argue that Trump had presidential classification powers. 

Trump has claimed before that he was abiding by the relevant law, the Presidential Records Act, by engaging in a post-presidency negotiation with the National Archives and Records Administration about returning documents. 

Facts First: Nothing in the Presidential Records Act suggests that there should be a negotiation between a former president and the National Archives and Records Administration over what presidential records should be turned over to NARA and when — much less that there should have been a months-long battle after NARA first sought the return of records from Trump in 2021. The law simply says that when a president leaves office NARA assumes control of all presidential records.

Jason R. Baron, former director of litigation at NARA and now a professor at the University of Maryland, said in an email: “Under the Presidential Records Act, at noon on January 20, 2021, all presidential records of the Trump White House by operation of law came into the legal custody of the Archivist of the United States. The Act does not provide for or contemplate that a former President can ‘negotiate’ the terms of surrendering physical custody of records that are properly owned by the American people.”

Timothy Naftali, a CNN presidential historian, New York University professor and former director of the Richard Nixon presidential library, said in an email: “The determination of what is a presidential document, and therefore public property, in the PRA isn’t subject to negotiation. Congress determined the definitions in 1978. I do not understand what the former president is referring to when he mentions a process of negotiation with NARA.”

A longtime Mar-a-Lago employee who is a central witness in the investigation into former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents is speaking publicly because he believes that voters should hear the truth about his former boss and the case before the November election.

Brian Butler, who is referenced as “Trump Employee 5” in the classified documents indictment brought by special counsel Jack Smith, told CNN in an exclusive interview earlier this week that he doesn’t believe the criminal case against Trump is a “witch hunt,” as the former president has claimed.

Butler gave testimony to federal investigators that informed crucial portions of last year’s criminal obstruction charges against Trump and his two co-defendants, Walt Nauta, a personal aide to Trump, and Carlos De Oliveira, a property manager at Mar-a-Lago who had been Butler’s closest friend until recently.

Butler, who was employed at Mar-a-Lago for 20 years, told CNN how he unknowingly helped Nauta deliver boxes of classified information from Mar-a-Lago to the former president’s plane in June 2022 — the same day that Trump and his attorney were meeting with the Justice Department at Mar-a-Lago about the classified documents.

Butler says Nauta and De Oliveira loaded a vehicle before driving it to the West Palm Beach airport. Butler arrived with his own car filled with Trump family luggage, then helped Nauta load Trump’s plane with the luggage — as well as bankers boxes of documents. Butler says he didn’t realize the boxes contained anything out of the ordinary.

Read more about Butler’s time at Mar-a-Lago and the documents case.

In the Georgia election subversion case — one of the other criminal cases Donald Trump faces — the presiding judge has thrown out some of the charges against the former president and several of his co-defendants.

The partial dismissal by Georgia Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee does not mean that the entire indictment has been dismissed. Prosecutors can also seek to restore the six tossed charges with an appeal.

McAfee ruled that several of the charges in the 41-count indictment related to Trump and some co-defendants allegedly soliciting the violation of oath by a public officer lacked the required detail about what underlying crime the defendants were soliciting.

Trump was named in three of the counts specifically, meaning the former president is now facing 88 charges over the four criminal indictments in Georgia, New York, Washington, DC, and Florida.

“The Court’s concern is less that the State has failed to allege sufficient conduct of the Defendants – in fact it has alleged an abundance. However, the lack of detail concerning an essential legal element is, in the undersigned’s opinion, fatal,” McAfee wrote in Wednesday’s order.

What this means: CNN Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig said the ruling “is an unforced error by prosecutors” and a setback for the case: “Essentially, prosecutors charged Trump and others with asking Georgia officials to violate the Constitution, but prosecutors failed to specify any underlying constitutional provision.”

Michael Moore, a CNN legal analyst and former US attorney, said McAfee’s action may mean the judge doesn’t think the case will go to trial this year.

On Thursday, Donald Trump and special counsel Jack Smith will have the chance to debate in court Trump’s most-cited legal argument in the classified documents case against him: whether as president, he was allowed to keep any documents he wanted.

Trump’s legal team have argued in several court filings that charges against the former president should be dismissed because, they claim, Trump had unfettered authority as president to decide what documents from his time in the White House he could keep as his personal records.

Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the case, has set apart an entire day to hear arguments on whether the prosecution should be thrown out on the basis of Trump’s claims about his presidential classification powers.

The hearing comes at a major inflection in the case. In the coming days and weeks, Cannon could rule on several big issues, including setting a new trial date – and whether it comes before the November election – as well as if Trump will get an evidentiary hearing over additional discovery he wants in the case from President Joe Biden’s White House, the FBI and beyond.

Trump is facing dozens of charges related to his alleged mishandling of classified documents, and for obstructing the Justice Department’s investigation. He has pleaded not guilty.

Read more about what Trump’s attorneys will argue.

Former President Donald Trump is expected to attend Thursday’s hearing in Fort Pierce, Florida, in the case over his alleged mishandling of classified documents, three sources familiar with his plans tell CNN.  

Trump also attended a hearing in the case earlier this month, during which his attorneys and special counsel Jack Smith’s team sparred over a potential trial date. 

As of now, Trump is not expected to speak to the media or deliver remarks around his appearance, the sources said.