Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump said in court papers filed on 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 New York Times reports. 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 Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., 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. While the 68-page filing was formally a request by Trump’s lawyers to the office of the 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 whistle-blower complaint relating to his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky,” 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.
Comments