Trump Hit Judge Cannon Up For Another Favor In Florida Docs Case

Last night Trump’s lawyers filed an absolutely gonzo motion to compel in the stolen documents case.

TL,DR? The entire executive branch is part of the “prosecution team,” and the special counsel is violating discovery requirements by refusing to scour the internal communications of the White House and multiple government agencies for irrelevant bullshit Trump can point to and shout BIAS in an attempt to distract the jury.

“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,” his lawyers Todd Blanche and Chris Kise fume. They go on to cite a cache of redacted documents they received pursuant to FOIA as proof of “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.”

“These revelations are disturbing but not surprising,” they intone ominously, before demanding a vast array of supposedly exculpatory evidence from everyone from the National Security Council to the Department of Energy, all of whom are described as being a part of the “prosecution team.”

The theory is that the prosecution was biased from its inception, and the special counsel is seeking to hide this by refusing to comply with discovery. This supposed bias and coordination can be inferred from “President Biden’s unprecedented and politically motivated abuse of President Trump’s executive privilege—in response to inquiries from the J6 Committee, and in the subsequent purported delegation of that decision to NARA.” In support of this proposition Trump cites dicta from Justice Kavanaugh’s concurring statement in an 8-1 refusal to disturb the DC Circuit’s ruling that it was entirely appropriate for the NARA to turn Trump’s presidential records over to the J6 Committee. (Justice Thomas, like you had to ask.)

In fact, bias lurks in every corner of the government, according to Trump, who has finally stopped screaming RUSSIA WITCH HUNT and switched to maniacally repeating DEEP STATE over and over. As it turns out, the entire DEEP STATE is part of the “prosecution team”

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Security Council participated in evaluating the security implications of the “spillage” of classified documents stored all over the former president’s private social club, magically converting it to a member of the prosecution team. And one time the DNI said that the Intelligence Community played down China’s electoral interference relative to Russia, and thus the court should not “accept the ipse dixit of the Special Counsel’s Office or the biased Intelligence Community regarding the alleged sensitivities associated with the documents and information at issue in this case.” The Department of Energy became part of the prosecution team because, “[i]n June 2023, after the Office filed the lawless charges in this case, the Department of Energy purported to retroactively terminate President Trump’s security clearance.” The National Archives is part of the “prosecution team” because it made the original referral — AKA the “sham referral” — to the Justice Department after finding classified documents in the boxes Trump finally did return. The Secret Service participated in hardening Mar-a-Lago so the sitting president could read classified documents there, making the agency a part of the prosecution team, required to turn over all documents because it might tend to prove that Trump wasn’t risking national security when he stored stolen government documents in his bathroom and in the pool shed. Also, the entire FBI and Justice Department, natch.

Trump’s lawyers and the Justice Department Manual both refer to Kyles v. Whitley, 514 U.S. 419, 437 (1995) for the definition of “prosecution team,” even though those words never appear in the case itself and the holding imposes an obligation on the prosecutor “to learn of any favorable evidence known to the others acting on the government’s behalf in the case, including the police.” The DOJ defines the term as encompassing “federal, state, and local law enforcement officers and other government officials participating in the investigation and prosecution of the criminal case against the defendant.” This would not appear to authorize a fishing expedition into internal White House communications, but YMMV, particularly in Judge Aileen Cannon’s courtroom.

As former AUSA Mitchell Epner, a current member at Rottenberg Lipman Rich told ATL, “it is clear that this filing is part of Trump’s ongoing efforts to contend that the prosecution is political and directed from the White House, rather than apolitical and directed by a Special Counsel insulated from the AG and White House.”

One person who is unequivocally part of the prosecution team is Thomas Windom — albeit the prosecution team on the election interference case in DC. But no matter! Noting that Windom performed some of the initial interviews in the documents case, and the fact that the two investigations share a grand jury, Trump’s lawyers seek to leverage Judge Cannon’s courtroom to get discovery that Judge Tanya Chutkan would never authorize. To wit, they want information on any contact between the special counsel and/or the White House and the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, which has filed an election interference case of its own against Trump in Georgia.

“Under these circumstances, evidence demonstrating that parts of the Biden Administration coordinated with Georgia prosecutors to file additional politically motivated charges—while the same White House Counsel’s Office was coordinating with NARA during the investigation— supports President Trump’s defense that the Biden Administration was coordinating behind the scenes to try to eliminate President Biden’s leading political rival,” Trump’s team argues. “The Special Counsel’s Office must produce any documents further reflecting this coordination. ”

In a final bit of humor, the former president’s lawyers continue their schtick of pretending to be simply country lawyers, unfamiliar with the sharp practices of these rapacious city prosecutors. After months of bellyaching about being forced to pore over documents line by line — like people who can’t afford an e-discovery vendor — they are now claiming to be flummoxed by the zip files containing CCTV footage of the pool shed where Trump stored his purloined loot. Indeed, co-defendant Walt Nauta’s lawyer Stan Woodward says he’s still unable to open the files that would show his client skulking around the basement of Mar-a-Lago trying to pinpoint the location of the security cameras and delete the footage.

In short, this is nonsense. But nonsense plays well in at least one Fort Pierce courtroom, so it might just work.

“We will see how Judge Cannon will handle this. It seems likely to create further delay,” Epner agreed.

Delay. Delay. Delay.

US v. Trump [SDFL Docket via Court Listener]

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Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.