The special counsel’s office accused the former president of creating a ‘false narrative’ in the case.
The special counsel’s team leading the classified documents case against Donald Trump argued that his lawyers have created an “inaccurate and distorted picture of events” after the former president’s lawyers said there was collusion between the special counsel’s office and the Biden administration.
In a 68-page court filing submitted on Feb. 2, special prosecutor Jack Smith’s team wrote that President Trump came up with “false narrative of the investigation’s origins” that, according to prosecutors, serves as a bid to cast a shadow on the investigation.
“The defendants’ motion paints an inaccurate and distorted picture of events,” they wrote, saying that the Trump team of lawyers should address so-called “misstatements” that may “leave a highly misleading impression on a number of matters” regarding the case.
The claims came in a court filing responding to a Trump team request from last month that sought to force prosecutors to turn over a trove of information that defense lawyers believe is relevant to the case.
“Their apparent aim is to cast a cloud of suspicion over responsible actions by government officials diligently doing their jobs,” prosecutors said in the filing, while asserting President Trump’s “insinuations have scant factual or legal relevance to their discovery requests, but they should not stand uncorrected.”
They added that prosecutors “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.”
President Trump faces dozens of felony counts in federal court in Florida accusing him of illegally retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate and obstructing government efforts to retrieve them. The case is currently set for trial on May 20, but that date could be pushed back.
Also in their recent court filing, prosecutors said many of the defense lawyers’ requests were too general and vague. In other instances, they said, they had already provided extensive information to the defense.
“The extensive discovery that the Government has provided exceeds in both scope and timing that to which the defendants are entitled under law. But the defendants are not permitted to the wide-ranging, irrelevant, and often non-existent discovery that they now request,” their filing said. “The court should deny the motion to compel in its entirety.”
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