Former President Donald Trump won a “sweetener” from the judge in his classified documents criminal case, as Judge Aileen Cannon removed one of the allegations in the indictment he’s facing.
Cannon, who Trump appointed to the U.S. District Court while he was in the White House, removed the accusation that the presumptive GOP presidential candidate showed a highly sensitive military map at his golf club in New Jersey, since he’s not being charged with displaying the document.
A paragraph from the indictment was removed on Monday, while Cannon also dismissed the request by Trump’s lawyers to throw the entire case against him out.
Following that decision, Lisa Rubin, a legal correspondent for MSNBC, wrote on the social media platform X:
“There’s a sweetener for Trump and his campaign chief Susie Wiles. And that sweetener was her decision to strike paragraph 36 of the indictment, which concerns Trump’s alleged showing, while at Bedminster, a classified map of a country with ‘an ongoing military operation’ ‘not going well’ to a ‘PAC Representative,’ reported to be Wiles.”
The case in question was brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith over Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents, and it’s been presided over by Cannon.
In addition to being charged with retaining classified documents illegally and hoarding them at his Florida resort at Mar-a-Lago, Trump is also being charged with obstructing attempts by federal officials to retrieve those documents, which they say are highly sensitive in nature.
After not turning those documents over to the National Archives when they requested them, they were eventually confiscated by FBI agents after a raid at his Florida resort in August 2022.
Just like he has in the other three criminal cases brought against him, Trump has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges levied against him in this case. He’s also denied that he did anything wrong.
Wiles is one of Trump’s close advisers. This April, Politico wrote a long feature about her, describing her as “the most feared and least known political operative in America,” adding she’s the former president’s “de facto campaign manager.”
Legal analysts have accused Cannon of being way too favorable to Trump, who appointed her to the position she currently occupies. They’ve said that she’s frequently clashed with Smith as well.
As Rubin said:
“Cannon says where prosecutors want to introduce evidence of prior crimes or wrongs, they have to provide ‘pretrial notice’ of the reasons justifying use of such evidence for purposes other than showing the defendant’s propensity to act in a given way, and motion practice ensues.”
Trump’s legal team has fought to get this case thrown out multiple times now, on different grounds, but each one of those efforts has failed.
What they have succeeded in doing, though, is delaying the case from when it was originally supposed to start. For now, it’s been postponed indefinitely, with no start date on the horizon.
