Court documents offer a glimpse into Trump's defense in the classified documents case

Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump told the federal judge overseeing his prosecution on charges of mishandling classified documents on Friday that they planned to ask the government for new information, including assessments of any damage to the nation's safety.

The attorneys also told the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, that they planned to ask prosecutors from Special Counsel Jack Smith for additional information about how the documents in question related to national defense — a requirement of the Espionage Act, a requirement of the Espionage Act. of the statutes that Mr. Trump is accused of violating. In addition, they said they wanted “tracking information” about the classified documents.

Mr. Trump's legal team is poised to make the requests on Tuesday, when it files motions seeking additional discovery evidence. This is a standard part of the pretrial process, where the defense tries to get as much information about the case from the government as possible. Discovery motions often outline how attorneys plan to approach a charge before a trial begins, or how they plan to defend against it once the case goes before a jury.

The papers filed Friday suggest Trump may be planning to attack the many spy laws he faces, including questioning whether the documents he took from the White House were actually related to national defense. They also suggest he may want to downplay how damaging their removal from the White House was to the country's security.

The papers themselves were not discovery motions, but rather a simpler request to use more pages than normal when the motions are due next week. But they did mention the broad categories of information that Mr. Trump's legal team will look for.

Mr. Smith's team filed its own set of court papers on Friday, telling Judge Cannon that they planned to call several FBI agents to testify at trial about data taken from cellphones and other devices seized of Mr. Trump's two co-defendants in the case. They are Walt Nauta, a personal assistant who served the former president of Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, and Carlos De Oliveira, Mar-a-Lago's property manager.

Some of the data, the papers said, will be used for the jury to track the movements of Mr Nauta and Mr De Oliveira during key moments of the investigation. Both men have been charged, along with Mr. Trump, with conspiring to obstruct the government's repeated efforts to retrieve the classified material.

Mr. Smith also told Judge Cannon about some expert witnesses who will testify about classified material, but that part of the file was filed under seal.

Until the two sets of papers were filed on Friday, the classified documents case had been relatively quiet in recent weeks, with attention focused on the other case Mr. Smith has brought against Mr. Trump — a case in which he was accused of plotting of plans to overturn the 2020 law. election. Last week, Mr. Trump asked a federal appeals court in Washington to dismiss the election interference charges, arguing that he was immune from them because they stemmed from actions he took while in office.

The documents case has largely been bogged down in arguments involving a host of classified materials discovered or generated during the investigation that Mr. Smith's prosecutors argue Mr. Trump should not have access to as part of the discovery process. Mr. Trump's lawyers responded with a highly unusual request to see a motion that the plaintiffs filed under seal with Judge Cannon explaining their reasons for withholding that material from Mr. Trump.

The case is approaching a turning point on March 1, when Judge Cannon has scheduled a hearing in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Florida, to discuss when the trial will begin. The proceedings were currently scheduled to begin on May 20, but late last year Judge Cannon expressed concern that the proceedings could “clash” with the election interference trial, which was set to begin in Washington in early March but could well be postponed.

Finding time for all four of Trump's criminal trials — there are two more, in New York City and Atlanta — has been a logistical headache. The proceedings must be planned not only in conjunction with each other, but also against the backdrop of an increasingly busy presidential campaign in which Mr. Trump is the current frontrunner to become the Republican nominee.

Mr. Trump has consistently tried to delay the trials, hoping he can delay them until after the election is decided. If he succeeds and wins the race, he could try to have federal charges against him dropped and could try to complicate local prosecutors' efforts to bring him to trial while he is in office.