Following are edited excerpts from
a current report in The Guardian:
US district judge Aileen Cannon rejects Trump’s motion to access filing explaining reasons for withholding classified informationThe attempt by Trump to access the filing was a brazen move that would have defeated the purpose of rules to protect national security in Espionage Act prosecutions and potentially thrown into disarray the scope and viability of continuing the case against Trump.
But in a nine-page order, the presiding US district judge Aileen Cannon ruled that Trump should not gain access to the secret filing because his legal team could still prepare a defense without it, even as she took issue with prosecutors’ reasoning for why access should be withheld.
The secret filing – known as a section 4 motion under the Classified Information Procedures Act, or Cipa – has long been treated as inaccessible to defendants because it discusses the very classified information that prosecutors want to redact, as well as their reasons for the redactions.
If defendants were given access to the section 4 motion, including the referenced classified documents in unredacted form and the accompanying declarations from the US intelligence community, it would effectively defeat the purpose of the motion and the Cipa statute more generally.
The basic goal of section 4, according to national security law experts, is to protect classified information from unnecessary exposure and graymail.
Cannon has previously drawn scrutiny from the 11th circuit. Before Trump was indicted, she upended the underlying criminal investigation by issuing a series of favorable rulings to Trump before the appeals court ruled she never had legitimate legal authority to intervene.
But it was highly brazen, even by Trump’s standards, to ask the judge not only to reject prosecutors’ request to redact the documents but also to see the underlying section 4 motion: it amounted to Trump’s lawyers asking to see the information prosecutors wanted hidden from Trump’s lawyers.
Trump’s lawyers argued they should be able to see the section 4 motion because the case involved a former president – once the chief classification authority – and in two terrorist cases, their lawyers with security clearances had ultimately been able to see some of the government’s motion.
