President Trump’s bid to throw out a superseding indictment has been rejected, but the Florida judge agreed to strike one paragraph from the charging document.
The federal judge overseeing one of the criminal cases against former President Donald Trump on June 10 rejected the former president’s bid to throw out some charges against him, although she ordered one paragraph struck from the superseding indictment in the case.
Along with his codefendants, former President Trump argued that the superseding indictment, which brought the obstruction charges he is facing, failed to state an offense and should be dismissed.
Special counsel Jack Smith and his team disagreed, asserting that the charging document was “more than sufficient” under the law.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, the judge overseeing the case in a Florida federal court, sided mostly with the government.
Judge Cannon said there were issues with the indictment but that the issues did not rise to the level of dismissing the additional charges.
“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 judge, appointed under President Trump, wrote in a 14-page order handed down on Monday night.
In portions of the indictment, according to former President Trump and codefendant Walt Nauta, the special counsel had wrongly charged the defendants with multiple offenses within a single count.
Count 34, for instance, charged former President Trump and Mr. Nauta with violating a law that prohibits acting with the intent to cause or induce a person to withhold testimony or documents from an official proceeding. The superseding indictment says that former President Trump “attempted to persuade Trump attorney 1 to hide and conceal documents from a federal grand jury; and Trump and Nauta misled Trump attorney 1 by moving boxes with classification markings so that Trump attorney 1 would not find the documents and produce them to a federal grand jury.”
