Special Counsel Jack Smith pushed back on Friday against former President Donald Trump’s persistent claims that his federal prosecution over alleged mishandling of classified documents is politically motivated.
Smith’s latest 67-page filing comes in response to a request Trump’s lawyers filed in mid-January, seeking to have lawyers in Smith’s office turn over additional evidence—including documents from intelligence agencies, the National Archives, and the Biden White House—that could be used by the former president’s legal team. In that filing, Trump’s lawyers indicated that they planned to use the evidence to argue that the investigation that led to his indictment was “politically motivated and biased.”
In their argument to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon overseeing the documents case, Smith’s lawyers accused Trump of attempting to “cast a cloud of suspicion over responsible actions by government officials diligently doing their jobs” by “putting a nefarious gloss on innocuous events.”
Prosecutors in Smith’s office, seeking to “set the record straight,” claimed that Trump and his lawyers are painting an “inaccurate and distorted picture” of the case, based on “speculative, unsupported, and false theories of political bias and animus.” Trump and his co-defendants’ legal problems, they concluded, “are solely of their own making.”
Looking to “clear the air” on the issue, the prosecutors offered a fine-grained account of the series of events leading to Trump’s indictment, arguing that the investigation into Trump’s holding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence was an appropriate response to an unprecedented situation.
When the National Archives and Records Administration asked the Justice Department in February 2022 to investigate Trump’s possession of classified records, it came after “months of efforts” to retrieve the documents, according to the Special Counsel’s Office. The former president’s lawyers have previously called the DOJ referral a “sham.”
“Put simply,” the prosecutors concluded, “the 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’s most sensitive information. The law required that those documents be collected.”
In addition to rebutting claims from Trump’s lawyers, Smith’s filing also contains some new information about the case that prosecutors have uncovered in the course of their investigation. 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.
The response also excoriated the specifics of Trump’s lawyers’ request for documents, which Smith argued should be wholly rejected. Some of the demands, prosecutors wrote, were so unclear “that it is difficult to decipher what they seek,” while others “reflect pure conjecture detached from the facts surrounding this prosecution.” Still, more of the requests, they argued, were for documents that had already been turned over to the defense.
DOJ reported that the government has already handed over 1.28 million pages of unclassified discovery documents to Trump’s lawyers, exceeding “in both scope and timing that to which the defendants are entitled under law.”