In an 86-page ruling last year, D.C. federal judge Beryl Howell went through the arguments from Donald Trump’s lawyers in his classified documents case and took them apart, barely concealing her disdain for defense claims that the former president – charged with taking national security secrets with him to his Florida resort and not giving them back – is a victim in all this.
First, a relatively brief recap: In June 2022, an attorney for Trump signed a document certifying that their client had handed over all classified documents in his possession. In August 2022, the Department of Justice, believing that certification to be false, carried out a court-authorized search at a Mar-a-Lago, recovering boxes full of top-secret documents, including information related to nuclear programs. Then, in December of that year, Trump’s attorneys, conducting a search of their own, found even more material – including folders in the former president’s bedroom.
In an effort to downplay their findings, Trump’s attorneys “misleadingly” characterized the bedroom documents as “low-level ministerial documents,” Howell said in her ruling, which rejected defense arguments that lawyer Evan Corcoran should not have to answer questions before a grand jury about the case. The former president’s attorneys failed to make “any explicit mention” about those documents, including White House schedules, having “classification markings.”
“Notably,” Howell continued, “no excuse is provided as to how the former president could miss the classified-marked documents found in his own bedroom at Mar-a-Lago.”
An appointee of former President Barack Obama, Howell also said there was evidence to suggest Trump had further attempted to obstruct justice. She pointed to an approximately nine-minute phone call on June 24, 2022, between Corcoran and Trump, in which the Republican candidate was informed that federal investigators had subpoenaed surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago. Prosecutors argue that the call “reflects the former president’s realization that the removal of the boxes from the storage room before [redacted] search was captured on camera – and his attempts to ensure that any subsequent movement of the boxes back to the storage room could occur off-camera.”
That is, after being informed that the government could observe their comings and goings, Trump appears to have directed his staff to avoid cameras going forward. Indeed, per Howell, the government "has provided sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the June 24, 2022 phone call may have furthered the former president’s efforts to obstruct the government’s investigation.”
Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney, said the unsealed ruling drives home just how needless the delays in the case have been. Cannon, a Trump appointee, has entertained a host of defense arguments that would likely have been dismissed by others – including that Trump had the right to take any documents he wished and post-facto claiming them as presidential records – and recently decided to indefinitely postpone a trial, some 11 months after she was assigned the case. She also unsealed Howell’s ruling because it was cited by the defense team as part of an effort to assert prosecutorial misconduct.
“If the classified documents case had been indicted in DC ... and Judge Howell was the assigned judge, it would be on an entirely different, more appropriate track, that would have protected speedy trial rights,” Vance argued.
Bradley Moss, a criminal defense attorney specializing in national security issues, likewise argued that Howell’s ruling showed how relatively simple the case against Trump is compared to the others he faces, including another brought by special counsel Jack Smith related to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
The classified documents case “was and will always have been the cleanest, most straightforward criminal prosecution of the four against the former president,” Moss wrote on social media. “That the public won’t see it brought to fruition before they go to the voting booth is a stain on the judicial system.”
