Jack Smith (AP Photo/Peter Dejong, Pool), Donald Trump (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
Special counsel Jack Smith responded Monday to an effort by Donald Trump and two co-defendants Walt Nauta and Carlos de Oliveira to get an “indefinite extension” of an upcoming deadline to compel discovery in the former president’s Mar-a-Lago prosecution. In doing so, Smith added in two footnotes that seemed to demonstrate irritation with the arguments Trump’s lawyers have been making.
Smith set the stage by telling U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon that the Trump team is clearly “fully equipped” to file unclassified discovery requests by Oct. 20 but that the government will not oppose a 10-day extension of the deadline for a motion to compel classified discovery.
Therefore, Smith said, the “defendants’ motion for an indefinite extension” of the Oct. 20 deadline “should be denied.”
The special counsel said that the defense motion not only misrepresented the record surrounding the production of evidence, but also “disregards their own demonstrated ability to formulate requests for additional unclassified discovery, and fails to disclose the Government’s position during conferral on this motion, in which the Government agreed to a brief continuance of the deadline for any motions to compel classified discovery.”
The special counsel’s team told the judge that Trump’s team had already received the “majority of the discovery in this case” months before the defense on Oct. 9 made dozens of discovery requests in a letter — 11 days before the deadline to file motions to compel.
Then came footnote 1, which suggested that the Trump team proceeded in this manner simply to delay: “Given that defendants received most of the discovery at issue months before, they could have made these requests earlier.”
Smith added that the Trump team’s “extensive discovery requests evidence their ability to thoroughly review and analyze the discovery it has been provided,” contrary to idea that an indefinite stay is warranted.
More Law&Crime coverage: Jack Smith fires back at Trump’s ‘distorted and exaggerated’ claim that special counsel is keeping ‘basic’ evidence from defense
Read Related Also: Man who showed up to statue protest wearing MAGA hat opens fire, hitting Native American activist: Cops
From there, the special counsel asserted that Trump’s lawyers wrongly “ridiculed the Government” for “failing to produce ‘nearly 50 FBI reports in the unclassified discovery that refer to enclosures and attachments that do not appear to have been produced.””
Smith noted Trump’s attorneys remarked that it was “difficult to understand how the case-file review mandated by the Justice Manual could miss that type of issue.”
The special counsel said that, actually, “in over half the identified instances” Trump’s team had the enclosure — “identified for the defense by Bates number” — and “in many of the remaining instances, the enclosures or attachments were not discoverable.”
Then came the second footnote, in which Smith accused Trump’s lawyers of lacking “effort”:
Trump’s counsel apparently made little effort to identify the enclosures on their own, given that in multiple instances the document specified, for example, that the referenced enclosure was a transcript or the audio recording of a specific interview that the Government already had produced.
At the end of the filing, the special counsel reiterated that the defense has the ability to meet the deadline to file a motion to compel unclassified discovery, while allowing that the classified discovery deadline can be pushed back 10 days.
“For the foregoing reasons, the Court should not extend defendants’ deadline to file any motion to compel with respect to unclassified discovery,” Smith said. “With respect to classified discovery, the Court should require defendants to make any discovery requests by October 20 and file any motion to compel by October 30.”
Read the special counsel’s motion in opposition here.
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
