In the summer of 2019, only hours after an Iranian rocket accidentally exploded at one of Iran's own launch sites, senior U.S. officials met with then-president Donald Trump and shared a sharply detailed, highly classified image of the blast's catastrophic aftermath. Worried that the image becoming public could hurt national security efforts, intelligence officials urged Trump to hold off until more knowledgeable experts were able to weigh in, the sources said.
A federal judge has denied former President Donald Trump's attempt to have his classified documents case dismissed based on the Presidential Records Act. Trump's attorneys had argued, as part of four motions to dismiss, that Trump should have been able to have custody of the documents in question, even after he was president, due to the Presidential Records Act. Judge Aileen Cannon last month denied another of Trump's motions seeking to dismiss the case based on unconstitutional vagueness.
Special counsel Jack Smith, responding on Tuesday to the judge overseeing former President Donald Trump's classified documents case, urged her to reverse course on entertaining the idea that Trump had any personal ownership over the classified materials he has been charged with unlawfully possessing. In a late-night filing replying to an order last month from Judge Aileen Cannon requesting proposed jury instructions that appeared to accept at face value what legal experts have argued is one of Trump's most fringe defenses that the former president had unchecked ability to claim all classified records as his personal property Smith argued that accepting such an argument would not only be "pure fiction," but "meritless and fatally undermined" by all the evidence gathered by the government as part of their case.