Former President Donald Trump will be restricted on how and when he can look at, and talk about, classified information, a judge decided Wednesday after a sealed hearing the day before.
The decision appears to largely be in line with restrictions special counsel Jack Smith sought to protect classified information that may be evidence in the case against Trump, which accuses him of criminally mishandling sensitive national security secrets at his Florida club and residence after he left office.
The development is one of the first times the court has set terms around classified information in a case where Trump’s team has tried to downplay the seriousness of how records were handled. Trump’s legal team had wanted more leeway on the locations where they could discuss classified records with him, including at the Mar-a-Lago club and his Bedminster, New Jersey, residence.
Judge Aileen Cannon warned in her order of the consequences should any classified or otherwise sensitive information be improperly revealed to the public, pointing out such disclosures may violate the law.
She added that even if classified information “enters the public domain,” both Trump and his team will still be “precluded from making private or public statements” regarding the classified status of information or suggesting that their own access to information confirms or contradicts what’s in the public domain.
Ignorantia juris non excusat
First, latin phrases don’t make you sound smart. they make you sound pretentious.
Secondly, there is the “Advice of Counsel” defense- saying, basically, that you were told by your lawyer that a given thing was legal. in Trump’s case, it doesn’t apply, largely because many of the people who were counseling him… weren’t in fact his lawyer at the time that they were giving that advice; and I’m pretty sure you’d have to also make an argument that you didn’t have any reason to know.
Latin terms are frequently used when discussing law, and that’s one of them. It’s maybe one of less commonly used ones among us laypeople compared to something like “habeas corpus,” but it’s still an actual term used to discuss a specific concept.
Lots of fields have terms of art that are maybe a bit unusual or unfamiliar to the average person, but using them doesn’t mean the person is trying to sound smart, they’re just using the proper terminology. Would you give someone shit for using the word “mortise” instead of something like "slot” or “hole” when discussing woodworking? Or for using baker’s percentages when sharing a bread recipe? Somehow I doubt it, so why give people shit for using legal terms when talking about law?
I agree, and I think the person above you was a jerk about it, but ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’ is a much more common way of phrasing it in English.