Judge refuses to throw out Trump unclassified documents case

Republican presidential candidate former president Donald Trump (Mike Roemer/AP)

A US federal judge refused to throw out the classified documents prosecution against Donald Trump, turning aside defence arguments that a decades-old law permitted the former president to retain the records after he left office.

Lawyers for Mr Trump, in asking for the case to be tossed out, had cited a 1978 statute known as the Presidential Records Act in arguing that he was permitted to designate records from his time in office as personal and take them with him when he left the White House.