Special counsel Jack Smith strongly refuted Donald Trump’s attempts to obtain information relevant to his classified documents case in a 67-page court filing.
Federal prosecutors argued that Trump’s legal team presented an “inaccurate and distorted picture of events” and attempted to cast suspicion over government officials’ actions.
They emphasized the extraordinary situation of a former President obstructing the collection of Presidential records, including highly classified documents, which are legally owned by the United States for historical and national security purposes.
“The defendants’ insinuations have scant factual or legal relevance to their discovery requests, but they should not stand uncorrected,” the prosecutors wrote.
Smith’s team also criticized the vagueness and broadness of Trump’s lawyers’ requests, highlighting that some had already been addressed in previous information disclosures.
They debunked Trump’s claim of having a security clearance issued by the Department of Energy after leaving the White House.
“Put simply, 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,” they wrote.
“One particularly interesting part of the government’s response related to a suggestion in Trump’s motion that he had some form of security clearance issued by the Department of Energy that continued after he left the White House,” former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance wrote. “Smith eviscerates that claim in response to Trump’s effort to force the government to search for more evidence that such a clearance existed.”
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