(PatriotWise.com) — In a motion filed last Friday, prosecutors in Donald Trump’s classified documents case blasted the defense for attempting to paint an “inaccurate and distorted picture” while unfairly seeking to “cast a cloud of suspicion” over officials who were doing their jobs, the Associated Press reported.
Prosecutors were responding to a motion filed by Trump’s legal team in mid-January seeking to force the prosecution to turn over communications between associates of President Biden and the special counsel’s office in hopes the documents might include information to support the defense’s theory that the case was politically motivated election interference.
In their response, prosecutors in the case argued that Trump’s attorneys were attempting to create a false narrative about the investigation into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents by making “insinuations” that have no legal or factual relevance to the discovery motion.
In their motion, prosecutors reiterated the facts of the case, namely that a former president had collected “a trove of highly classified documents” that legally belonged to the government and were required to be collected.
Prosecutors contested the sheer volume of documents requested by the defense, arguing that the request was so vague and general that it was indecipherable. They noted that some of the information requested by the defense had already been turned over by the prosecution.
In their January motion, Trump’s attorney also cited an action taken by the Department of Energy in June to “retroactively terminate” the former president’s security clearance and demanded information about that decision, arguing that Trump’s post-presidential security clearance was vital in the defense’s arguments of the “good-faith and non-criminal states of mind relating to possession of classified materials.”
In their response, prosecutors argued that the specific clearance granted to Trump in February 2017 ended when he left office, and the Energy Department belatedly updated the government database to reflect that. At the same time, prosecutors said that even if the “Q clearance” had remained active after Trump left office, it would not have given him “the right to take any documents” to his home and store them at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump faces dozens of felony charges accusing him of illegally storing classified documents at his Florida estate and obstructing the federal government’s efforts to retrieve them.
The trial is currently scheduled to begin on May 20; however, the date could be pushed back.
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