Trump secret documents case judge grants his request for hearing on key evidence in indictment – ​​Queen City News

ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press

36 minutes ago

FILE – Republican presidential candidate Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally, June 22, 2024, at Temple University in Philadelphia. A federal judge presiding over Trump’s secret documents indictment hears arguments Monday, June 24, on whether to bar him from making public comments that prosecutors say could endanger the lives of FBI agents working on the case. Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team says the restrictions are necessary in light of Trump’s false comments that FBI agents who searched his Mar-a-Lago estate for secret documents wanted to kill him and his family. (AP Photo/Chris Szagola, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal judge presiding over former President Donald Trump’s secret documents case granted Thursday his request for a hearing on whether prosecutors were improperly allowed to violate attorney-client privilege after obtaining key evidence from one of his former lawyers.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s order ensures further delays in a criminal case that has already been mired in significant postponements, resulting in the indefinite cancellation of a trial date that had been set for May 20 in Fort Pierce, Florida. That means Cannon will reconsider another judge’s order from last year that allowed prosecutors to obtain testimony and other evidence from a Trump lawyer who ultimately was cited multiple times in the former president’s indictment.

Trump has been charged with dozens of counts of illegally collecting secret documents from his presidency at his Mar-a-Lago estate and obstructing FBI efforts to recover them. He has pleaded not guilty.

Defense attorneys are usually protected from being forced to testify about confidential client conversations, but they can be forced to do so if prosecutors can show that their legal services were used to commit a crime – a doctrine known as the criminal defense exception.

Then-Chief Federal Judge for the District of Columbia Beryl Howell agreed with special counsel Jack Smith’s team last year that the exception applied and ordered testimony to the grand jury by Trump lawyer M. Evan Corcoran, who represented the former president during the Aug. 8, 2022, FBI searched Mar-a-Lago for classified documents and seized boxes of secret files.

She also instructed Corcoran to turn over audio recordings he made that documented his impressions of conversations he had with Trump about returning the documents. These conversations form the basis of key passages in the indictment, including one quote in which Trump proposed not to cooperate with the FBI and the Department of Justice in connection with a request for the return of secret documents he took with him to Mar-a-Lago after leaving the United States. White House.

“Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” Corcoran quoted him as saying.

In her Thursday order, Cannon concluded that “defendant Trump’s motion to produce facts does not contain anything unduly prejudicial or legally erroneous,” while seeking to distract Smith’s team from concerns that the hearing could be a “mini-trial.”

“There is a difference between a resource-wasting and delay-inducing ‘mini-trial,’ on the one hand, and an evidentiary hearing designed to resolve disputed issues of fact and law in the context of a specific pretrial motion to dismiss, on the other,” she said.

Cannon stated that “it is the Court’s duty to make anew the factual findings on this issue of criminal fraud.”

The judge also denied a request for a hearing on Trump’s separate team, saying the Justice Department presented false or misleading information in its request to search Mar-a-Lago. For example, they argued that the request should have noted that a senior FBI official had proposed seeking consent from Trump’s lawyers for the search rather than obtaining a court-issued search warrant.

Cannon, however, sided with Smith’s team, stating that neither this nor any other alleged negligence raised by the defense had any bearing on whether prosecutors had sufficient probable cause to search the property. She signaled this position during her hearing earlier this week.

“Even if we accept these statements made by a senior FBI official, the motion does not provide sufficient basis to conclude that including the official’s perspective in the statement (or the differing views of other FBI agents that he generally mentions in his testimony) would have changed the evidentiary calculus in favor of probable cause for the alleged crimes,” Cannon wrote.