Special counsel Jack Smith shredded Donald Trump's effort to have prosecutors share information that his defense believes relevant to the former president's classified documents case in a scathing court filing Friday.
In the 67-page motion, federal prosecutors argued that Trump's legal team offered an “inaccurate and distorted picture of events” and attempted to “cast a cloud of suspicion over responsible actions by government officials diligently doing their jobs," The Associated Press reports.
"The defendants’ insinuations have scant factual or legal relevance to their discovery requests, but they should not stand uncorrected,” the prosecutors write in the response, adding: “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.”
Smith's team also argued that the requests Trump's lawyers made were nearly indecipherable because of how vague and broad they were. Some of the requests, they added, had already been addressed in previous instances when the prosecution turned over a swath of information to the defense.
"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 in her Sunday newsletter. "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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