Donald Trump’s lawyer has accused prosecutors of delaying his classified document case by a “troubling” failure to hand over files to the defense.
In a submission to Judge Aileen Cannon on Wednesday, Trump’s lawyer, Christopher Kise, accused the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith of not disclosing some material until Trump’s team requested that they do so.
“The suggestion that the Office was within their rights to withhold discoverable materials until confronted with such a demand is troubling,” he wrote.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 40 federal charges of retaining classified materials and then obstructing federal attempts to retrieve them from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
The frontrunner in the GOP primary denies all wrongdoing, and has repeatedly said that the charges are part of a politically motivated witch hunt to stop him winning the 2024 election.
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Newsweek sought email comment from Kise and from Smith’s office on Thursday.
Judge Cannon, a federal judge in Florida, has had to rework the pre-trial schedule because of delays, with the Smith and Trump teams blaming each other for the slow pace of progress.
Kise wrote that that the delays “have resulted from (1) misrepresentations to the Court this summer by the Special Counsel’s Office concerning the timing and scope of pretrial discovery; and (2) the Office’s failure to take steps to timely establish adequate secure facilities for review of classified discovery, CIPA [Classified Information Procedure Act] litigation, and classified motions to compel.”
The Department of Justice’s legal obligation to create a secure room so that both sets of lawyers can review highly classified documents found in Mar-a-Lago has been an ongoing source of contention between the two legal teams.
The secure rooms have special security features, such as anti-bugging technology.
Smith has previously accused Trump’s lawyers of using the secure room requirement to delay the trial. He also wrote that Trump’s lawyers were supplied with special secure laptops on which to write court briefs but that they denied weeks later that they ever received the secure laptops.
In his latest submission, Kise also accused Smith’s office of delaying the release of unclassified documents in the case.
“The Special Counsel’s Office represented as early as June 23, 2023, that it had ‘moved swiftly to produce all unclassified discovery…to the defense.’ That was not true,” Kise wrote.
“Further, at a conference on July 18, 2023, the Office represented to the Court that, ‘essentially from day one, we’ve had all the discovery and been able to produce it and to have the case ready from our perspective to go to trial.’ That was not true, either,” Kise wrote.
Judge Cannon held a closed door meeting with Donald Trump in a secure room in Florida on Monday.
The meeting had to be held in the secure room because the parties discussed some of the highly confidential classified documents found in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. The room was set up in a federal court house in Fort Pierce, Florida.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.