(CN) — A federal judge on Thursday ordered an additional hearing to determine the constitutionality of a search warrant FBI agents used in their 2022 raid of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon's ruling followed a Tuesday hearing in Fort Pierce, Florida, where Trump’s attorneys tried to get the court to suppress evidence that investigators found in their “unlawful” raid of Trump’s property. They complained that the search warrant was overly broad and violated Trump’s Fourth Amendment rights.
His attorneys also pushed for a Franks hearing to allow them to question the motivations of the raiding agents. The Trump-appointed Cannon denied that request on Thursday.
“Trump has not made the requisite ‘substantial preliminary showing’ that the affidavit in support of the Mar-a-Lago search warrant contains any material false statements or omissions,” she wrote.
But she greenlit an evidentiary hearing to dig deeper into the particularity of the search warrant.
Though she told Trump’s lawyers on Tuesday that the warrant “seems like it is” particular enough to be constitutional, Cannon wrote Thursday that she “agrees with defendant Trump that ambiguities persist.”
Trump claims the warrant's broadness led to agents searching rooms they shouldn’t have, like the bedrooms of his wife Melania and teenage son Barron, and taking personal documents that had nothing to do with the classified records they were seeking to reclaim.
“The court determines that some of the terms in that document (e.g., “national defense information” and “Presidential Records”), do not carry “generally understood meanings” such that a law enforcement agent, without further clarification, would have known to identify such material as “seizable” property,” Cannon wrote.
Earlier this week, Trump also challenged prosecutors’ use of his then-attorney’s notes in their case against him in a sealed hearing with Cannon. Prosecutors used notes from Trump’s former lawyer Evan Corcoran to show Trump’s supposed efforts to hide classified documents from federal agents at Mar-a-Lago.
“I don't want anybody looking, I don't want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don't, I don't want you looking through my boxes," Trump said, according to a snippet of Corcoran’s notes included in the indictment. "Look I just don't want anybody going through these things.”
Trump on Tuesday contested that those notes were privileged and don’t fall under the crime-fraud exception as prosecutors claim. Cannon’s Thursday ruling opens the door for a hearing discussing this issue, too.
The judge also responded to prosecutors' repeated concerns that an evidentiary hearing like this will function as a mini trial and only add to the delay.
“There is a difference between resource-wasting and delay-producing ‘mini-trial,’ on the one hand, and an evidentiary hearing geared to adjudicating the contested factual and legal issues on a given pre-trial motion to suppress, on the other,” she wrote.
Trial was initially scheduled for May 20, but last month Cannon indefinitely delayed the proceedings. The judge has yet to set a date for the evidentiary hearing on the warrant and privilege issues.
Trump is accused of illegally stashing classified documents in his Mar-a-Lago residence after losing the 2020 presidential election, then bucking federal efforts to return them to the National Archives. He’s charged with 40 counts in total: 32 counts of willful retention of national defense information under the Espionage Act, seven obstruction counts and one count for making false statements.
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