FORT PIERCE, Florida — Judge Aileen Cannon appeared highly skeptical on Tuesday of Donald Trump’s bid to throw out evidence seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Trump’s lawyers argued at a court hearing that the 2022 search warrant in the classified documents investigation was overly broad and violated Trump’s rights. They said FBI agents took medical records and improperly entered the bedroom of his son Barron and the quarters of his wife, Melania.
Cannon indicated that she was unpersuaded by the defense’s arguments, saying that the main issue at hand was whether the warrant had been “particular enough.”
“I think it is,” she said.
Her skepticism toward Trump’s defense arguments was unusual for the judge, a Trump appointee who has issued many favorable rulings toward Trump and has often clashed with special counsel Jack Smith’s team — including just a day earlier, when she scolded one of Smith’s prosecutors for using an indecorous tone.
Cannon did not indicate when she would issue a formal ruling on Trump’s bid to toss out the evidence.
The FBI agents who searched Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 found hundreds of classified documents strewn throughout Trump’s living area. Trump is charged with illegally hoarding national secrets after he left office and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them.
Prosecutors argued that the agents who conducted the search did everything by the book. They only seized documents that contained government, presidential or classified records, and didn’t seize anything from the rooms of Melania or Barron, prosecutors said.
The medical records had been in boxes that also contained the documents they were looking for, but the government returned them promptly, prosecutor David Harbach said.
Harbach maintained that agents had broad leeway to search the property given that the investigation had shown that Trump himself had access to much of the property — with the exception of guest rooms — and that Trump had asked for the documents to be moved around the property. Harbach noted that some of the classified documents were found in a bathroom.
By the end of the two hour, 40-minute hearing, Cannon appeared to lose patience with both sides, telling the defense to stay on topic when attorney Emil Bove began questioning the motives of the investigators in the case and whether they’d complied with search regulations. Cannon then scolded Harbach when he stood up and accused Bove of “attempts to hijack” the hearing. She said she didn’t want each side to get into a “tit for tat.”
“There’s no hijacking, it’s about to end,” she said before dismissing the court.
Tuesday’s session was the last in a series of hearings that began Friday. The hearings included discussions about whether the special counsel had been appropriately appointed and funded, and whether to issue a gag order against Trump to protect agents against threats.
The attorneys also met with Cannon in a session not open to the public on Tuesday morning to talk about a defense motion to throw out a voice memo from Trump’s ex-lawyer.
Cannon has postponed the trial date in the case indefinitely, and she offered no hint at when she might schedule a new trial date.
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