(PM.) In a motion filed on Tuesday, Donald Trump’s team in the Mar-a-Lago documents case alleged bias against Trump by the intelligence community, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and Biden’s special counsel Jack Smith, the prosecutor in the case. Smith is also prosecuting a separate case related to the 2020 election and January 6 in a DC court.
The motion, which asks the judge to compel Smith’s team to turn over materials in the case, states that “The Special Counsel’s Office has disregarded basic discovery obligations and DOJ policies in an effort to support the Biden Administration’s egregious efforts to weaponize the criminal justice system in pursuit of an objective that President Biden cannot achieve on the campaign trail: slowing down President Trump’s leading campaign in the 2024 presidential election.”
“The patent absurdity of the Office’s efforts is illustrated by the fact that, while working toward a historic landslide victory in the Iowa caucuses yesterday, President Trump was also preparing to bring to Your Honor’s attention today the record of misrepresentations and discovery violations that have marred this case from the outset and illustrate that the Office has disregarded fundamental fairness and its legal obligations in favor of partisan election interference,” the filing states.
The filing states that new evidence obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests “reveals that politically motivated operatives in the Biden Administration and the National Archives and Records Administration began this crusade against President Trump in 2021,” and these FOIA releases, along with evidence contained in the more than 1.2 million pages of discovery, “reflect close participation in the investigation by NARA and Biden Administration components such as the White House Counsel’s Office, as well as senior officials at DOJ and FBI.”
The team states that there is evidence of collusion between Smith’s office and “the White House, DOJ, FBI, and NARA to use the Presidential Records Act (“PRA”) as a law enforcement tool, and to abuse grand jury procedures, in violation of due process, other constitutional rights, and the executive privilege.”
The filing notes that the Department of Energy, in June of 2023, moved to terminate Trump’s security clearance. The team is seeking records related to this decision, as such records “are relevant to the issue of whether any possession of allegedly unclassified documents in 2021 and 2022 was ‘unauthorized.'”
