Former US President Donald Trump arrives at 40 Wall Street after his court hearing to determine the date of his trial for allegedly covering up hush money payments linked to extramarital affairs in New York City on March 25, 2024.
Charly Triballeau | AFP | Getty Images
Donald Trump on Thursday afternoon lost two separate attempts to dismiss criminal charges against him in his Florida and Georgia cases.
In Florida federal court, Judge Aileen Cannon rejected Trump’s bid to drop charges against him related to his alleged mishandling of hundreds of classified documents after he left the White House.
In a brief order, Cannon wrote that Trump’s argument, which hinged on his interpretation of the Presidential Records Act, was an insufficient basis for dismissal.
That ruling came about two hours after Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee denied Trump’s attempt to dismiss his Georgia election interference case on the grounds that it violated his free speech rights.
The twin losses came one day after New York Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan denied a request by Trump to delay his upcoming criminal hush money trial.
That case is set to begin jury selection in less than two weeks. It is the first of Trump’s four criminal cases to go to trial.
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee has aggressively sought to dismiss all of his criminal trials, or at least to push them past the November election. In the hush money case alone, he has made eight attempts to delay the trial.
Thursday’s developments were not a total win for Trump’s prosecutors, however.
Cannon’s ruling also pushed back on special counsel Jack Smith, who criticized the judge’s guidelines earlier this week for the proposed jury instructions.
Smith said that Cannon’s guidelines, which asked the parties to write jury instructions about how to interpret the Presidential Records Act, were based on a false legal premise that wrongly gave credence to Trump’s claims.
Smith asked Cannon to decide quickly if she will adopt those jury instructions, so that he has time to appeal her decision.
Cannon on Thursday slammed that demand as “unprecedented and unjust.”
The judge wrote that her order about the jury instructions “should not be misconstrued” as the final word on any essential piece of the case.
Rather, she wrote, it was “a genuine attempt, in the context of the upcoming trial, to better understand the parties’ competing positions” in a complex case.
But Cannon added that Smith is nonetheless free to make use of “whatever appellate options it sees fit to invoke, as permitted by law.”
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