Prosecutors in documents case reject Trump's claims of bias
Federal prosecutors on Friday pushed back against former President Donald J. Trump's claim that his prosecution over his handling of classified documents was motivated by a long-standing bias against him among the intelligence community and other government officials.
Opposition from Special Counsel Jack Smith's office came in a court file of 67 pages. The filing was intended to argue against Mr. Trump's requests for additional discovery materials in the classified documents case.
When Mr. Trump's lawyers made these requests for materials last month, they indicated that they planned to place allegations that the intelligence community and other members of the so-called deep state were biased against Mr. Trump as the core of their defense.
But Mr. Smith's team said the former president's requests for additional information were “based on speculative, unsupported and false theories of political bias and hostility.”
Some of Mr. Trump's demands for discovery were so ambiguous “that it is difficult to decipher what they are seeking,” the prosecutors wrote, while others, they added, “reflect pure suspicion, regardless of the facts surrounding this persecution.”
Discovery disputes can be contentious in criminal cases, as lawyers push for as much information as possible and prosecutors try to limit access to material they believe is irrelevant.
But the discovery battles in the classified documents case and in Trump's other federal case — in which he is accused of plotting to overturn the 2020 election — have been particularly bitter. That's because his legal team has advanced a series of baseless claims that government officials acted improperly in an effort to secure charges against Mr. Trump.
For example, his lawyers have said that officials at the National Archives — the agency responsible for processing presidential records — worked with the Biden administration to make what they describe as a “sham” referral to the Justice Department that Mr Trump An investigation should be launched for withholding classified documents.
But Mr Smith's prosecutors rejected these claims, arguing the referral came only after “months of efforts” to recover the documents. They also accused Trump's lawyers of trying to “sow a cloud of distrust over responsible actions by government officials who were diligently doing their jobs.”
“Simply put,” prosecutors wrote, “the government here was confronted with an extraordinary situation: a former president guilty of calculated and persistent obstruction of the collection of presidential documents, which by law are the property of the United States for the sake of history and posterity, and actually contained here is a trove of top secret documents containing some of the country's most sensitive information.
The filing traces the investigation from officials' discovery in the archives of classification marks on more than 180 documents that Mr. Trump returned to the agency in early 2022, to a subsequent grand jury subpoena issued in May of that same year for all additional documents. classified materials in the former president's possession.
Ultimately, prosecutors said, two of Trump's aides at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, helped move boxes of classified documents in an effort to hide the material from the government. That prompted investigators to step up their investigation, prosecutors wrote, seizing several electronic devices, interviewing dozens of witnesses and eventually searching Mar-a-Lago, discovering another trove of classified material.
“Defendants' story ignores the fact that several federal agencies confronted and responded appropriately to an extraordinary situation that arose entirely from Defendants' conduct,” prosecutors wrote.
Mr. Smith's team reminded Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who is overseeing the case in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Florida, that the jury will have to consider only three questions: whether Mr. Trump “intentionally withheld documents ” that highly sensitive national defense information; whether he and his co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, conspired to obstruct the government's investigation into the documents; and whether they made false statements to the FBI
“The jury will not be asked to decide whether the investigation and prosecution of the case was 'politically motivated and biased,'” prosecutors wrote.
Prosecutors also gave an example of the exhaustive nature of their investigation into Mr. Trump.
They revealed for the first time that of the 48,000 guests who visited Mar-a-Lago between January 2021 and May 2022, when classified material was housed in the property's ballrooms and bathrooms, only 2,200 people had their names checked and only 2,900 people's names were checked. guided by magnetometers.