Federal prosecutors pushed again on Friday in opposition to former President Donald J. Trump’s rivalry that his prosecution over the dealing with of categorised paperwork was motivated by a longstanding bias in opposition to him among the many intelligence businesses and different authorities officers.
The pushback by the workplace of the particular counsel, Jack Smith, got here in a 67-page courtroom submitting. The submitting was supposed to argue in opposition to Mr. Trump’s requests for extra discovery supplies within the categorised paperwork case.
When Mr. Trump’s attorneys made these requests for supplies final month, they signaled that they deliberate to put accusations that the intelligence neighborhood and different members of the so-called deep state have been biased in opposition to Mr. Trump on the coronary heart of their protection.
However Mr. Smith’s staff stated that the previous president’s requests for extra data have been “based mostly on speculative, unsupported, and false theories of political bias and animus.”
A few of Mr. Trump’s calls for for discovery have been so ambiguous “that it’s tough to decipher what they search,” the prosecutors wrote, whereas others, they added, “replicate pure conjecture indifferent from the details surrounding this prosecution.”
Discovery disputes might be contentious in felony instances as protection attorneys push for as a lot data as they will get and prosecutors search to restrict entry to supplies that they consider are irrelevant.
However the discovery battles within the categorised paperwork case and in Mr. Trump’s different federal case — through which he stands accused of plotting to overturn the 2020 election — have been significantly bitter. That’s as a result of his authorized staff has superior a sequence of baseless claims that authorities officers acted improperly in an try to safe prices in opposition to Mr. Trump.
His attorneys have stated, as an example, that officers on the Nationwide Archives — the company answerable for dealing with presidential information — labored in collusion with the Biden administration to make what they described as a “sham” referral to the Justice Division that Mr. Trump needs to be investigated for holding on to categorised paperwork.
However Mr. Smith’s prosecutors rejected these claims, arguing that the referral got here solely after “months of efforts” to get the paperwork again. In addition they accused Mr. Trump’s attorneys of searching for to “solid a cloud of suspicion over accountable actions by authorities officers diligently doing their jobs.”
“Put merely,” prosecutors wrote, “the federal government right here confronted a rare scenario: a former president participating in calculated and protracted obstruction of the gathering of presidential information, which, as a matter of regulation, belong to america for the good thing about historical past and posterity, and, as a matter of truth, right here included a trove of extremely categorised paperwork containing a number of the nation’s most delicate data.”
The submitting traced the investigation from the invention by officers on the archives of classification markings on greater than 180 paperwork that Mr. Trump returned to the company in early 2022 to a subsequent grand jury subpoena that was issued in Could of that very same yr for all extra categorised supplies within the former president’s possession.
Finally, prosecutors stated, two of Mr. Trump’s aides at Mar-a-Lago, his personal membership and residence in Florida, helped transfer packing containers containing categorised paperwork in an effort to hide the fabric from the federal government. That prompted investigators to step up their inquiry, prosecutors wrote, seizing varied digital gadgets, interviewing dozens of witnesses and ultimately looking Mar-a-Lago and discovering one other trove of categorised materials.
“The defendants’ narrative overlooks the truth that varied federal businesses confronted, and appropriately responded to, a rare scenario ensuing solely from the defendants’ conduct,” prosecutors wrote.
Mr. Smith’s staff reminded Choose Aileen M. Cannon, who’s overseeing the case in Federal District Courtroom in Fort Pierce, Fla., that the jury shall be requested to contemplate solely three questions: whether or not Mr. Trump “willfully retained” paperwork containing extremely delicate nationwide protection data; whether or not he and his co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, conspired to hinder the federal government’s inquiry into the information; and whether or not they made false statements to the F.B.I.
“The jury won’t be requested to determine whether or not the investigation and prosecution of the case have been ‘politically motivated and biased,’” prosecutors wrote.
Prosecutors additionally gave a pattern of the exhaustive nature of their investigation of Mr. Trump.
They revealed, for the primary time, that of the 48,000 visitors who visited Mar-a-Lago between January 2021 and Could 2022, when categorised materials was housed on the property in ballrooms and bogs, solely 2,200 individuals had their names checked and solely 2,900 handed by way of magnetometers.
