Jack Smith Fires Back in Mar-a-Lago Documents Case

On January 16, lawyers for the defendants in the documents case in Florida dropped a hefty 68-page motion to compel discovery, littered with conspiratorial and outlandish claims. Now, the Special Counsel’s office has responded in a doorstep-sized filing of its own, which cuts through the defense’s propagandistic assertions.

The defense had made numerous questionable claims, all wrapped up in an overarching narrative that the Government has “disregarded basic discovery obligations”. From the outset, the Special Counsel’s response makes clear that this isn’t the case. The defendants in the case have received “substantial, timely, and thorough discovery”, obtaining “1.28 million pages of unclassified discovery and all of the CCTV footage” by early September 2023. Since then, the Government has continued to supplement discovery as necessary. In highlighting that the prosecution has in fact exceeded its discovery obligations, the filing asserts that the Government “recognizes its discovery obligations, has complied with them, and will continue to do so.” Not only that, but “the Government has already furnished the defendants with what they seek to the extent that the law requires.” 

The defense’s claims of the “Biden Administration’s egregious efforts to weaponize the criminal justice system” are dismissed outright as “speculative, unsupported, and false theories of political bias and animus” that are “detached from the facts surrounding this prosecution.” Always a step ahead, Jack Smith also alludes to the use of court filings as a campaign tool, stating that “it is necessary to set the record straight on the underlying facts that led to this prosecution, because the defendants’ motion paints an inaccurate and distorted picture of events…the defendants’ misstatements, if unanswered, leave a highly misleading impression on a number of matters.” 

In his filing, Trump had made broad claims that the so-called ‘deep state’ was aligning against him in this case, tarring everyone from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the entire intelligence community, the FBI, and “members, relatives or associates of the Biden Administration” as nefarious agents of the prosecution, out to bring him down at any cost. In response, the Government painstakingly explains the exact timeline of how this case evolved, from “the tail end of the Trump Administration itself, at the conclusion of which the Archivist of the United States was to assume custody of all Presidential records”. That, as we know, did not happen. Instead, “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 Special Counsel accuses the defense of misrepresenting the facts to begin the timeline not at the end of the Trump Administration, but in May of 2021, cherry-picking exhibits and selectively quoting “from documents that the Government itself produced in discovery, putting a nefarious gloss on innocuous events.” 

After a detailed recounting of how this case came to be and thoroughly debunking each of the defense’s arguments – including that the ‘’scope of the prosecution team” should be expanded to include dozens and dozens of people and agencies unrelated to the broader case - we learn some eyebrow raising facts.

• Alongside the letter the President Obama left in the Resolute Desk for Trump and correspondence from Kim Jong-un of North Korea, NARA realized that the records they did receive at the end of the Trump Administration were also missing the infamous “poster board showing the path of Hurricane Dorian.”

• Neither the intelligence community database nor the Department of Defense database contains details of Trump’s past or present security clearance. Nor was there a record of his clearance with the Department of Energy, as databases were updated at the end of his term to reflect the termination of his clearances. (President Biden took the unusual step of barring Trump from receiving intelligence briefings – a privilege usually afforded to former Presidents - when he took office, citing national security fears in light of the events of January 6).

• The Government “obtained via subpoena” the email accounts of three Secret Service agents.

• Shockingly, defense counsel for co-defendant De Oliveira told the Special Counsel’s office that “he did not own or have access to a laptop or desktop computer and was instead attempting to review the entirety of the Government’s discovery on a handheld tablet.”

The response was extraordinarily detailed and thorough but didn’t generate half the media coverage that Trump’s initial motion did, despite some of the illuminating claims outlined above. Arguably, that was the point of what the defense submitted – not to further their own position and undermine the prosecution, but to plant wild theories, devoid of evidence, in the media ecosystem. At this point, nothing Trump does is for the benefit of his legal defense, it’s for campaign purposes. It’s asymmetrical information warfare, as the Government does not have the luxury of calling a press conference from the courthouse steps. Which is why, despite the delays or frustrations of the justice system, we need to keep reminding people of how we got here, to push back against Trump’s dominance of the narrative, and inject some reality back into the discourse.