The special counsel’s office on Sunday scolded Donald Trump over the former president’s plan to argue that he’s being prosecuted unfairly in his classified documents case, criticizing Trump’s attempts to “draw comparisons” between former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, among others.
Special counsel Jack Smith was replying in a court filing on Sunday to lawyers for Trump and his two co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, saying they “belatedly” and improperly raised their intention to file a “selective and vindictive prosecution” motion in a reply brief when they should have instead waited to address their new claims in a scheduled Feb. 22 motion the defendant plans to file.
Trump on Friday used his latest reply memorandum to raise concerns about a “long list of similarly situated government officials not being charged with a crime in connection with allegations” related to the handling of classified information, according to a 37-page filing on Feb. 9. That filing came just one day after a separate special counsel announced that President Joe Biden had mishandled classified documents but would face no charges for doing so.
“Others include former President William Clinton, former Vice President Mike Pence, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former FBI Director James Comey,” Trump’s lawyers wrote, also mentioning the report by special counsel Robert Hur and his decision not to prosecute Biden for classified documents that were discovered at his Wilmington, Delaware, home.
Smith on Sunday argued that Trump’s filing on Friday “advances new factual claims that they should not be permitted to raise for the first time in a reply to which the Government has no opportunity to respond.”
“The defendants advanced none of these legal or factual claims in their motion to compel, despite the fact that all but one of them were known to them before they filed their motion,” Smith added.
While the Clintons, Pence, and the former FBI director are named in Trump’s list of examples, Trump’s main basis for raising the selective and vindictive arguments on Friday arose due to the findings from Hur’s report one day earlier.
“Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice released a report issued by Special Counsel Robert Hur, finding that President Biden has ‘willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,’ over the course of his decades-long career. President Biden will not be charged, and President Trump should not have been either,” their filing stated.
Trump on Monday arrived at the federal courthouse in Miami as he and his attorneys plan to meet for several hours with U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in a closed-door hearing, without prosecutors present, to discuss access to evidence that could affect whether Trump is tried before the November election.
The defense is slated to argue this week for access to classified evidence they or their clients haven’t seen yet. Prosecutors seek to keep some of that evidence from the defense, and the dispute could result in Trump’s team receiving only summaries of records to be cited as evidence given the sensitivity of the details, according to court records.
Smith last week also raised warnings in court filings over evidence of threats made to potential witnesses in the case, arguing Trump should not be allowed to see the list of threats made to a witness who could testify against him at trial.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Cannon, an appointee of the former president, nevertheless told Smith to give Trump exhibits detailing information about the threatened witness by Feb. 10, although there is little that Trump can do with the information given that he is not allowed to disclose the contents of those exhibits.
Trump faces 40 felony charges in Smith’s classified documents case, including 32 counts of willful retention of national defense information and violations of the Espionage Act after investigators retrieved troves of documents from his Mar-a-Lago resort home in August 2022.
