\n<\/p>\n
Special Counsel Jack Smith<\/strong> pushed back on Friday against former President Donald Trump\u2019s<\/strong> persistent claims that his federal prosecution over alleged mishandling of classified documents is politically motivated.\u00a0<\/p>\n Smith\u2019s latest 67-page filing<\/a> comes in response to a request Trump\u2019s lawyers filed<\/a> in mid-January, seeking to have lawyers in Smith\u2019s office turn over additional evidence\u2014including documents from intelligence agencies, the National Archives, and the Biden White House\u2014that could be used by the former president\u2019s legal team. In that filing, Trump\u2019s lawyers indicated<\/a> that they planned to use the evidence to argue that the investigation that led to his indictment was \u201cpolitically motivated and biased.\u201d<\/p>\n In their argument to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon<\/strong> overseeing<\/a> the documents case, Smith\u2019s lawyers accused Trump of attempting to \u201ccast a cloud of suspicion over responsible actions by government officials diligently doing their jobs\u201d by \u201cputting a nefarious gloss on innocuous events.\u201d<\/p>\n Prosecutors in Smith\u2019s office, seeking to \u201cset the record straight,\u201d claimed that Trump and his lawyers are painting an \u201cinaccurate and distorted picture\u201d of the case, based on \u201cspeculative, unsupported, and false theories of political bias and animus.\u201d Trump and his co-defendants\u2019 legal problems, they concluded, \u201care solely of their own making.\u201d<\/p>\n Looking to \u201cclear the air\u201d on the issue, the prosecutors offered a fine-grained account of the series of events leading to Trump\u2019s indictment, arguing that the investigation into Trump\u2019s holding of classified documents<\/a> at his Mar-a-Lago residence was an appropriate response to an unprecedented situation.\u00a0<\/p>\n When the National Archives and Records Administration asked the Justice Department in February 2022 to investigate Trump\u2019s possession of classified records, it came after \u201cmonths of efforts\u201d to retrieve the documents, according to the Special Counsel’s Office. \u00a0The former president\u2019s lawyers have previously called the DOJ referral a \u201csham.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPut simply,\u201d the prosecutors concluded, \u201cthe Government here confronted an extraordinary situation: a former President engaging in calculated and persistent obstruction of the collection of Presidential records, which, as a matter of law, belong to the United States for the benefit of history and posterity, and, as a matter of fact, here included a trove of highly classified documents containing some of the nation\u2019s most sensitive information. The law required that those documents be collected.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to rebutting claims from Trump\u2019s lawyers, Smith\u2019s filing also contains some new information about the case that prosecutors have uncovered in the course of their investigation<\/a>. Of the approximately 48,000 guests who visited Mar-a-Lago when classified documents were being held at the compound, only 2,200 had their names checked, while just 2,900 passed through magnetometers.<\/p>\n The response also excoriated the specifics of Trump\u2019s lawyers\u2019 request for documents, which Smith argued should be wholly rejected. Some of the demands, prosecutors wrote, were so unclear \u201cthat it is difficult to decipher what they seek,\u201d while others \u201creflect pure conjecture detached from the facts surrounding this prosecution.\u201d Still, more of the requests, they argued, were for documents that had already been turned over to the defense.<\/p>\n DOJ reported that the government has already handed over 1.28 million pages of unclassified discovery documents to Trump\u2019s lawyers, exceeding \u201cin both scope and timing that to which the defendants are entitled under law.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n