New Jack Smith filing tears apart Trump’s 'speculative, unsupported and false theories'

02 February 2024

On Friday, Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith submitted a 67-page filing to the US District Court in the Southern District of Florida, where former President Donald Trump's criminal trial over alleged mishandling of classified documents is scheduled to take place later this year. The filing takes Trump and his lawyers to task for its "pervasively false narrative" concerning the case itself.

In his tweet of the filing Politico legal correspondent Kyle Cheney noted that Smith detailed how the government took a "cautious" and "incremental approach" to obtaining presidential documents from Trump, whom Smith described as having "unprecedented defiance" to lawful requests for documents the government is required to obtain and preserve.

"[T]he 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," Smith wrote. "The law required that those documents be collected. And the record establishes that the relevant government officials performed their tasks with professionalism and patience in the face of unprecedented defiance."

Smith's Friday filing is in response to a previous filing by Trump's legal team seeking additional "discovery" (i.e. documents, communications, transcripts, emails, etc.) that requested what Smith characterized as "abstract rulings on the scope of the prosecution team." Smith argued that the new discovery motion "should be denied as legally and factually flawed," since such requests "must be based on specific demands, tied to the case, for items material to preparing the defense."

"Instead of meeting those standards, the defendants’ motion seeks non-discoverable materials based on speculative, unsupported, and false theories of political bias and animus," Smith wrote. "Many of the requests are so generalized that it is difficult to decipher what they seek. Others reflect pure conjecture detached from the facts surrounding this prosecution."

The special counsel further elaborated that "it is necessary to set the record straight on the underlying facts that led to this prosecution, because the defendants’ motion paints an inaccurate and distorted picture of events." The filing lays out how Trump bucked the Archivist of the United States' attempts to obtain presidential documents required by law at every attempt dating back to late January of 2021, when President Joe Biden first assumed office and Trump became a private citizen. Smith also reiterated that his office had already supplied Trump and his attorneys with "1.28 million pages" of documents as a result of other discovery requests, and that his prosecutors will continue to be forthcoming with any requests that meet standard guidelines.

"The defendants have received substantial, timely, and thorough discovery in this case," Smith wrote. "This production not only complies with the Government’s constitutional and rule-based discovery obligations; it goes far beyond. The Government recognizes its discovery obligations, has complied with them, and will continue to do so."

Click here to read Smith's new filing in full.

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