Jack Smith filing reveals Trump’s 'frivolous' effort to 'run out the clock before election': scholar

Lawyers representing Donald Trump in his classified documents case, according to The Associated Press, submitted a request last month for special counsel Jack Smith's prosecution team "to hand over certain documents that they claim will serve as evidence of bias and misconduct related to records that were retrieved from" the MAGA hopeful's Mar-a-Lago estate.

Ex-New York prosecutor and Pace University law professor Bennett Gershman tells Salon that in response to the request, a court filing submitted by Smith's team last week "intended to show that the defense’s arguments are frivolous and an attempt to obfuscate, distort, and confuse the facts about Trump’s unlawful conduct."

To prove that Trump attorneys "painted an 'inaccurate and distorted picture of events'" and "unfairly" tried to 'cast a cloud of suspicion' over government officials carrying out their duties," Greshman notes prosecutors included "1.28 million pages, hundreds of hours of video footage, identities and descriptions of the 48,000 guests at Mar-a-Lago between January 2021 and May 2022, details of the FBI investigation and search, and a showing that while classified documents were on Trump’s property, only a handful of Trump’s guests, 2,200, had their names checked and passed through magnetometers."

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In the filing, Smith's team wrote, "The defendants rely on a pervasively false narrative of the investigation’s origins," and their "insinuations have scant factual or legal relevance to their discovery requests, but they should not stand uncorrected."

Gershman tells Salon, "It is 'commonplace' in criminal litigation that when the defense has a 'weak case,' they attack the prosecutor. Here, the defense is claiming that the prosecution had failed to disclose evidence that Trump had a security clearance to retain documents at Mar-a-Lago and that the White House and other federal agencies possessed critical but undisclosed information relevant to the defense case."

Salon reports, prosecutors "contended that the government faced an 'extraordinary situation' with a former president engaging in 'calculated and persistent obstruction of the collection of Presidential records,' which belonged to the United States. The records included a 'trove of highly classified documents containing some of the nation’s most sensitive information,' which the law required to be collected."

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Salon's full report is available at this link.