Particular Counsel Jack Smith pushed again on Friday in opposition to former President Donald Trump’s persistent claims that his federal prosecution over alleged mishandling of labeled paperwork is politically motivated.
Smith’s newest 67-page filing is available in response to a request Trump’s attorneys filed in mid-January, looking for to have attorneys in Smith’s workplace flip over further proof—together with paperwork from intelligence companies, the Nationwide Archives, and the Biden White Home—that may very well be utilized by the previous president’s authorized crew. In that submitting, Trump’s attorneys indicated that they deliberate to make use of the proof to argue that the investigation that led to his indictment was “politically motivated and biased.”
Of their argument to U.S. District Decide Aileen Cannon overseeing the paperwork case, Smith’s attorneys accused Trump of trying to “forged a cloud of suspicion over accountable actions by authorities officers diligently doing their jobs” by “placing a nefarious gloss on innocuous occasions.”
Prosecutors in Smith’s workplace, looking for to “set the file straight,” claimed that Trump and his attorneys are portray an “inaccurate and distorted image” of the case, primarily based on “speculative, unsupported, and false theories of political bias and animus.” Trump and his co-defendants’ authorized issues, they concluded, “are solely of their very own making.”
Seeking to “clear the air” on the problem, the prosecutors provided a fine-grained account of the collection of occasions resulting in Trump’s indictment, arguing that the investigation into Trump’s holding of labeled paperwork at his Mar-a-Lago residence was an applicable response to an unprecedented state of affairs.
When the Nationwide Archives and Data Administration requested the Justice Division in February 2022 to research Trump’s possession of labeled data, it got here after “months of efforts” to retrieve the paperwork, in accordance with the Particular Counsel’s Workplace. The previous president’s attorneys have beforehand known as the DOJ referral a “sham.”
“Put merely,” the prosecutors concluded, “the Authorities right here confronted a rare state of affairs: a former President participating in calculated and protracted obstruction of the gathering of Presidential data, which, as a matter of regulation, belong to the US for the advantage of historical past and posterity, and, as a matter of reality, right here included a trove of extremely labeled paperwork containing a few of the nation’s most delicate info. The regulation required that these paperwork be collected.”
Along with rebutting claims from Trump’s attorneys, Smith’s submitting additionally accommodates some new details about the case that prosecutors have uncovered in the midst of their investigation. Of the roughly 48,000 visitors who visited Mar-a-Lago when labeled paperwork had been being held on the compound, solely 2,200 had their names checked, whereas simply 2,900 handed by magnetometers.
The response additionally excoriated the specifics of Trump’s attorneys’ request for paperwork, which Smith argued must be wholly rejected. A few of the calls for, prosecutors wrote, had been so unclear “that it’s tough to decipher what they search,” whereas others “mirror pure conjecture indifferent from the info surrounding this prosecution.” Nonetheless, extra of the requests, they argued, had been for paperwork that had already been turned over to the protection.
DOJ reported that the federal government has already handed over 1.28 million pages of unclassified discovery paperwork to Trump’s attorneys, exceeding “in each scope and timing that to which the defendants are entitled beneath regulation.”
