The former president’s lawyers may question whether the documents he took from the White House were related to national defense and whether the country’s security was damaged.
- Share full article
Former President Donald J. Trump in Des Moines, Iowa, on Wednesday.
Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump on Friday told the federal judge overseeing his prosecution on charges of mishandling classified documents that they intended to ask the government for new information, including assessments of any damage to national security.
The lawyers also told the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, that they planned to ask prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, for additional information about how the documents at issue were related to national defense — a requirement of the Espionage Act, one of the statutes that Mr. Trump has been accused of violating. In addition, they said they wanted “tracking information” concerning the classified records.
Mr. Trump’s legal team is poised to make the requests on Tuesday, when it files motions asking for additional discovery evidence. This is a standard part of the pretrial process in which the defense seeks to get as much information about the case out of the government as it can. Discovery motions often indicate how lawyers intend to attack charges before a trial begins or how they plan to defend against them once the case goes in front of a jury.
The papers filed on Friday suggest Mr. Trump may be planning to attack the multiple Espionage Act counts he is facing by, among other things, questioning whether the documents he took from the White House were actually related to national defense. They also suggest he may seek to downplay how damaging their removal from the White House was to the country’s security.
The papers themselves were not discovery motions, but rather a more simple request to use more pages than normal when the motions are due next week. But they did mention the broad categories of information that Mr. Trump’s legal team will seek.
Mr. Smith’s team filed its own set of court papers on Friday, telling Judge Cannon that they intended to call several F.B.I. agents to testify at trial concerning data extracted from cellphones and other devices seized from Mr. Trump’s two co-defendants in the case. They are Walt Nauta, a personal aide who served the former president at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, and Carlos De Oliveira, Mar-a-Lago’s property manager.
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Source: nytimes.com
