Federal Judge Aileen Cannon issued an order Monday for lawyers to submit instructions for a trial jury in former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case – signaling that the debate over whether Trump had the authority to keep documents from his White House could remain a central issue of the case, which could help him at trial.
But – to the surprise and confusion of several legal experts on Monday – Cannon asked the attorneys in the case to consider how to incorporate into the trial the Presidential Records Act.
The request is an unusual one that leads both sides into hypothetical, untrodden territory.
Cannon asked both the Justice Department and defense team to contemplate how a jury could be told to weigh the criminal law around national security records if Trump could say the PRA gave him authority to keep documents he chose.
The Justice Department maintains his charges have nothing to do with the PRA and are about what happened after the presidency: how classified records about US and foreign military secrets were kept without federal protection at a private beach club and allegedly moved around so government officials wouldn’t find them.
Cannon’s order on Monday could also be viewed as a logic exercise that’s hard to parse – even for experienced lawyers trying to determine where she is leading the attorneys involved.
“I don’t get what she’s doing with this. I don’t understand where she is going with this order,” Brad Moss, a national security lawyer, told CNN on Monday. “It’s a bizarrely written set of questions that doesn’t lend itself to an easily understandable set of answers.”
Moss added it’s possible Cannon wants to push some questions about the documents Trump kept to the jury, as she’s…
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