Former President Donald Trump has long claimed that the criminal and civil cases against him are politically motivated and designed to hinder his campaign efforts, and in recent weeks, his legal teams have merged those arguments into his various case defenses.
In the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, for example, where special counsel Jack Smith is prosecuting the former president for allegedly mishandling classified documents kept at his Mar-a-Lago residence, President Trump made new allegations of election interference.
“The Special Counsel’s Office has disregarded basic discovery obligations and DOJ [Department of Justice] policies in an effort to support the Biden administration’s egregious efforts to weaponize the criminal justice system in pursuit of an objective that President Biden cannot achieve on the campaign trail: slowing down President Trump’s leading campaign in the 2024 presidential election,” a new motion reads.
The Jan. 17 filing makes an explicit reference to President Trump’s campaigning and victory in the recent Iowa caucus and dubs it a “patent absurdity” that he was made to prepare this motion at the same time.
President Trump’s recent defense strategy has included discrediting the cases against him legally by accusing the prosecutors of politically motivated action on the part of the Biden administration and demanding the documentation to go along with it.
The special counsel’s office has made blanket refusals in the two federal cases that Mr. Smith is prosecuting against President Trump, arguing that the materials aren’t relevant or aren’t in the office’s possession.
The defense is accusing the special counsel of violating his obligations to produce discovery—materials the defense has a right to access in order to prepare its case. It’s also bringing to the attention of the court evidence that the case may have been hatched in 2021 by “politically motivated operatives.”
Timeline Issues
A good portion of this 2021 evidence has been redacted in the publicly available court filing, but the defense cited emails from five months after President Trump left office, including correspondence between the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), President Trump’s representatives, and the new administration.In the indictment, the prosecutors claim that NARA independently referred the case to the DOJ, but defense attorneys argue that this was false and that the White House had instructed NARA to involve prosecutors.
“Though the Special Counsel’s Office has suppressed these communications, we know from FOIA releases that NARA started to coordinate with the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community by Jan. 25, 2022,” the defense argued.
They stated that the Biden administration tried to “cover up evidence of [its] biased participation in the investigation” based on several redacted NARA emails.
“Although NARA and NARA-OIG had been providing DOJ and the FBI information relating to the 15 boxes since January 2022, the White House Counsel’s Office did not seek President Trump’s permission under the PRA to grant the FBI access to the 15 boxes until April 2022,” the motion reads.
The NARA-OIG is the National Archives Office of Inspector General, and PRA is the Paperwork Reduction Act.
By March 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland had authorized a DOJ and FBI investigation into President Trump.
Prosecution ‘Team’
Because the defense believes that several departments were involved in the formation of the case, it has demanded discovery materials from or related to each of these. However, the prosecutors argue that these outside agencies aren’t subject to discovery.“NARA is part of the prosecution team in this case because of the agency’s participation in significant investigative steps, such as the collection and review of the 15 Boxes, and its close coordination with DOJ, FBI, and the White House,” the motion reads.
The team also includes intelligence agencies that participated during classification reviews and damage assessments, the defense argued. The indictment lists as “equity” holders of the documents the “Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Department of Energy, and the Statement Department.”
“The prosecution team is not limited to attorneys at the Special Counsel’s Office who consider themselves to be ‘working on this case,’” the defense stated.
The motion also points to the fact that the special counsel used the same grand jury to bring charges against President Trump in two separate federal criminal cases and conducted several overlapping investigations that should now be subject to discovery.
The “Brady rule” requires prosecutors to disclose evidence in the defendant’s favor, and the defense is arguing that material that shows the case was spurred by political opponents of President Trump would certainly help exonerate him. In court filings, the prosecutors have largely avoided debating whether the case is politically motivated.
