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Donald Trump’s bids to dismiss three of the criminal cases against him have been summarily thrown out by a trio of state and federal judges in the space of just 24 hours, delivering a fresh set of legal setbacks to the former president as he ramps up his latest election campaign.
A federal judge in Florida on Thursday denied a request by the 77-year-old to dismiss the 40 charges he faces over the classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Trump’s team had argued that the former president had the “discretion” while in the White House to designate hundreds of pages of military intelligence records as personal files, which they claimed he would then have been authorised to retain.
Judge Aileen Cannon rejected that argument in a decision that came after a separate ruling by a Georgia court to deny Trump’s request to dismiss the election interference case he faces in that state. The former president had argued, unsuccessfully, that his actions in the aftermath of his 2020 loss were protected under the First Amendment of the US constitution.
One day earlier, a judge in the “hush money” case brought against Trump in Manhattan, which is due to go to trial later this month, also declined to dismiss those charges, writing that the former president’s claims that he was protected by presidential immunity were “untimely”.
Justice Juan Merchan, who is overseeing the case, added that the last-minute filing raised “real questions about the sincerity and actual purpose” of the motion.
Trump is also battling a nearly half-billion-dollar civil fraud judgment in New York that threatens the real estate empire that brought him fame and fortune.
He is appealing against the decision, and struggled to secure a bond for the full amount to halt enforcement. An appeals court later ruled he only needed to come up with $175mn, and earlier this week Trump posted a bond for that amount.
However, on Thursday, the New York attorney-general raised concerns about the validity of the $175mn bond. Letitia James’s office suggested that the Los Angeles-based Knight Insurance Group, which had underwritten the bond, was not authorised to provide a surety in New York state. A hearing has been set for later this month.
Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, has previously found some success in his attempts to delay the cases against him on procedural grounds.
His team convinced the US Supreme Court to take up a challenge to the fourth criminal case he faces, which involves federal election interference charges, on the question of whether he is entitled to presidential immunity for his actions in the aftermath of the 2020 election. The high court is unlikely to decide the issue until the summer.
Cannon, the Trump-appointed judge overseeing the federal documents case, had previously denied another motion by the former president to dismiss the case due to its purported vagueness, but not ruled on other motions to dismiss or set a firm date for a trial.
The Georgia case was delayed significantly after Trump’s lawyers accused Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis, who brought the charges, of a conflict of interest due to a previous romantic relationship with the lead prosecutor. Willis has since been forced to change her team.
The original trial date in the Manhattan case — in which Trump is charged with paying off a porn actress with whom he allegedly had an affair before the 2016 election and then disguising those transactions in business records — was delayed by a few weeks after his lawyers said they needed more time to review potentially relevant evidence.
Further attempts to postpone the case on the grounds of pre-trial publicity, among other contentions, have failed.
Jury selection in set to begin on April 15 for a trial that is expected to last six weeks. Trump will be forced to attend the proceedings in Manhattan criminal court four days a week.
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