Lawyers for former President Donald Trump said in court papers filed Tuesday night that they intended to place accusations that the intelligence community was biased against Trump at the heart of their defense against charges accusing him of illegally holding onto dozens of highly sensitive classified documents after he left office.
The lawyers also indicated that they were planning to defend Trump by seeking to prove that the investigation of the case was “politically motivated and biased.”
The court papers, filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Pierce, Florida, gave the clearest picture yet of the scorched-earth legal strategy that Trump is apparently planning to use in fighting the classified documents indictment handed up over the summer.
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While the 68-page filing was formally a request by Trump’s lawyers to the office of special counsel Jack Smith to provide them with reams of additional information that they believe can help them fight the charges, it often read more like a list of political talking points than a brief of legal arguments.
Criminal defendants routinely make such requests in what are known as motions to compel discovery, but many of the requests in Trump’s filing appeared intended to paint Trump as the victim of the spy agencies that once served him and of purported collusion between the Biden administration and prosecutors who have filed some of the four criminal cases he now faces.
That portrait was in keeping with Trump’s persistent refrain that the so-called “deep state” has been out to get him nearly from the moment he entered public service. Such allegations have proved politically useful to Trump even if his evidence in support of them has often been dubious or lacking.
The nation’s spy services took center stage in the papers, given that intelligence officials are likely to testify at trial about what Trump’s lawyers called their “subjective assessments” of the more than 30 classified documents that the former president is accused of removing from the White House.
“One of the ways in which President Trump will challenge that testimony is by demonstrating that the intelligence community has operated with a bias against him dating back to at least the 2019 whistleblower complaint relating to his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy,” two of Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche and Christopher M. Kise, wrote, referring to the incident that resulted in Trump’s first impeachment trial.
Blanche and Kise said they planned to use “evidence relating to analytic bias harbored by the intelligence community” to undermine the prosecution’s contention that the documents Trump took with him were connected to issues of national defense. Smith’s team will have to prove such connections for jurors to find the former president guilty of violating the Espionage Act, the central statute he is accused of breaking.
While the specific contents of the documents remain unknown, the indictment says that some are related to nuclear secrets and military plans against U.S. adversaries. The documents, which came from several intelligence agencies, were among the most highly classified records the federal government had, court papers say.
Trump’s legal team has persistently derided all of the cases he is facing as partisan attacks against him as he mounts his third bid for the White House. And in the filing Tuesday night, Blanche and Kise asked Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the classified documents case, to force Smith to give them any “documents and communications reflecting bias and/or political animus toward President Trump” by members of his own prosecution team.
The lawyers further asked for any communications between Smith’s team and the White House, as well as for those between the White House and local prosecutors in Georgia who have charged Trump in a sprawling racketeering indictment with seeking to overturn the results of that state’s election in 2020.
The filing additionally asked for information about one of Smith’s chief deputies, Thomas P. Windom, who has taken the lead in prosecuting the other federal case that Trump is facing — one in which he stands accused of plotting to overturn his 2020 loss to Joe Biden. In a previously undisclosed detail, the filing noted that Windom had also played a sizable role in prosecuting the classified documents case.
Trump’s lawyers noted, for example, that the National Archives, which set in motion the document investigation after it discovered sensitive records in a trove of materials that Trump returned to its office after leaving the White House, had reached out to Windom in February 2022. The lawyers said that Windom, aside from the interviews he conducted during the election interference case, also conducted 29 interviews in the classified document case.
The filing also asked for additional information about a security clearance from the Energy Department that Trump somehow maintained well after leaving office. That “inconvenient truth,” as his lawyers described it, could help Trump defend himself against charges that he illegally held on to at least one of the documents in the case — a record related to “nuclear weaponry.”
The filing Tuesday night was similar in tone and substance to a discovery request that Trump’s lawyers made in November in the election interference case, which is unfolding in U.S. District Court in Washington.
In that filing, the lawyers suggested that they planned to question the findings of the intelligence community that the 2020 election was conducted fairly. They also indicated that they intended to raise a host of distractions as part of their defense, saying they wanted to drag unrelated matters like the criminal prosecution of Biden’s son Hunter into the case.
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