Former President Donald Trump’s attorneys reportedly plan to win his classified documents case by proving that the intelligence community is “biased” against him.
This and more was revealed in a filing submitted by his attorneys on Tuesday.
They said in the filing that they plan “to place accusations that the intelligence community was biased against Mr. 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,” according to The New York Times.
The intelligence community is relevant to the case because members of it are expected to testify about the classified documents that Trump kept with him after leaving office in early 2021.
“One of the ways in which President Trump will challenge [their] testimony is by demonstrating that the intelligence community has operated with a bias against him dating back to at least the 2019 whistle-blower complaint relating to his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky,” Trump’s attorneys wrote.
The attorneys also attacked special counsel Jack Smith.
“The Special Counsel’s Office has disregarded basic discovery obligations and DOJ 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,” they argued.
In attacking Smith, they pointed to Trump’s decisive victory in Iowa this week and argued that the classified documents case against him demonstrates “partisan election interference.”
“The patent absurdity of the Office’s efforts is illustrated by the fact that, while working toward a historic landslide victory in the Iowa caucuses yesterday, President Trump was also preparing to bring to Your Honor’s attention today the record of misrepresentations and discovery violations that have marred this case from the outset and illustrate that the Office has disregarded fundamental fairness and its legal obligations in favor of partisan election interference,” they wrote.
In the filing, Trump’s attorneys also demanded additional information about an alleged security clearance from the Energy Department that the former president had utilized after leaving office to justify him holding onto the classified documents.
Trump’s attorneys tonight in classified docs case file bombshell motion for discovery—again insists Special Counsel Jack Smith is concealing evidence including voluminous records demonstrating collaboration btw Biden White House, NARA, DOJ, FBI, and intel agencies: pic.twitter.com/cXr9endnj5
— Julie Kelly (@julie_kelly2) January 17, 2024
All this comes roughly a year and a half after Trump was charged with dozens of felonies for holding onto classified documents after leaving office.
“The charges include 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information and single counts of false statements and representations, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document, concealing a document in a federal investigation and a scheme to conceal,” according to NBC News.
The judge presiding over the case is Trump appointee Aileen Cannon. Her willingness to side with Trump on a number of case-related matters has made her public enemy number one in the eyes of leftists.
Last week, she issued a ruling rejecting the special counsel’s request “that she order Trump to state whether he intends to rely on an ‘advice of counsel’ defense ahead of the trial, currently scheduled for May 20,” according to Slate.
That said, not everybody is confident she’ll acquiesce to the Trump team’s latest demands.
Appearing on MSNBC, former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance claimed the request for more information will be struck down in its entirety.
“They want the special counsel to go and work with the entire intelligence community to turn over everything in the intelligence community’s possession that touches on anything to do with this,” she said.
“So I think the safe thing to say is that we should wait for Jack Smith’s response, which will undoubtedly be pretty harsh, given what the defense is requesting here,” he added.
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CNN analyst Katelyn Polantz also had his criticisms of the filing.
“This is a typical thing to happen before any trial where the defense team says we want more evidence,” she said. “We want to look at more things to build our case. So what Trump’s team is doing now is they’re trying to build that case. What they want to do … is they want to be able to try and find some level of political coordination or communication between not just the Justice Department and their decision-making, but other places.”
What makes this request “really unusual,” she continued, is that it includes “everybody.”
“It’s the intelligence community, it’s the White House counsel’s office, the Biden White House, the National Security Council. They want to see interactions between the Fulton County D.A. and the White House, Secret Service, archives,” she explained.
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V. Saxena is a staff writer with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University. Saxena also contributes to BizPac Review.
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