WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal judge presiding over the classified documents case of former president Donald Trump granted a defense request for a hearing on whether prosecutors improperly breached attorney-client privilege when they obtained crucial evidence from of his ex-lawyers.
But U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon also denied a request for a hearing on a separate Trump team claim that the Justice Department had submitted false or misleading information in an application for a warrant to search Trump's Florida estate for classified records two years ago.
The order amounts to a mixed result for both sides and ensures further delays in a criminal case that has already been snarled by significant postponements, resulting in the indefinite postponement of a trial that had been set to begin on May 20 in Fort Pierce, Fla.
In a bid to suppress as evidence the classified documents seized by the FBI during the Aug. 8, 2022, Mar-a-Lago search, defense lawyers have said the Justice Department omitted or misrepresented certain facts in its application to a magistrate judge to obtain a warrant. They argued, for instance, that the application should have noted that a senior FBI official proposed seeking the consent of Trump's lawyers for a search rather than obtaining a court-authorized search warrant.
But Cannon sided with prosecutor Jack Smith's team in finding that neither that nor any other of the alleged omissions raised by the defense had any bearing on whether or not prosecutors had sufficient probable cause to search the property.
“Even accepting those statements by the high-level FBI official, the Motion offers an insufficient basis to believe that inclusion in the affidavit of that official’s perspective (or of the dissenting views of other FBI agents as referenced generally in his testimony) would have altered the...
