OAN’s Brooke Mallory
11:55 AM – Tuesday, October 10, 2023
In response to former president Donald Trump’s request to postpone his trial until after the 2024 election, Special Counsel Jack Smith said that there is no “credible justification” for doing so.
This particular case revolves around accusations regarding Trump’s alleged mishandling of sensitive information.
“The defendants make numerous allegations regarding their access to classified discovery arising from the status of secure facilities, their clearances, and other considerations. Most of the allegations are inaccurate or incomplete; collectively they are misleading,” Smith’s office said in a court filing on Monday.
According to the document, prosecutors claim to be aware of the reasons why Trump is said to have illegally retained a vast amount of national security material after leaving the White House, and they also claim that some of the data was much more critical than they had first thought.
“That the classified materials at issue in this case were taken from the White House and retained at Mar-a-Lago is not in dispute; what is in dispute is how that occurred, why it occurred, what Trump knew, and what Trump intended in retaining them — all issues that the Government will prove at trial primarily with unclassified evidence,” the filing says.
“Whether the highly classified documents Trump retained at Mar-a-Lago contain national defense information is a fact Trump can try to dispute, but it will hardly be the centerpiece of the trial,” it added.
The government made the statements in response to Trump’s legal team’s arguments that the trial must be postponed since the most sensitive papers, which call for security clearances and a secure location to be read, “have not been examined.”
The majority of the documents, according to the prosecution, are already available to Trump’s legal team.
However, a small subset of them are allegedly “so sensitive” that they cannot be kept in a standard SCIF, or sensitive compartmented information facility, and must instead follow “enhanced security protocols for their transport, review, discussion, and storage.”
“The special measures documents constitute a tiny subset of the total array of classified documents involved, which is itself a small subset of the total discovery produced,” Smith’s filing claimed.
The filing makes no mention of how, when, or why the categorization was changed.
According to the prosecution, the government is attempting to construct a facility in Florida that is safe enough to hold the records, but in the meantime, “with appropriate notice, those documents can be couriered by qualified control officers from the intelligence community to a SCIF in south Florida for defense inspection.”
Trump’s legal team asserted in their declaration that he had not yet had a chance to evaluate the records for himself, but Smith’s brief suggests the claim is a “red herring.”
Smith’s team is “not aware of any request by Trump to personally appear” or to “inspect any documents—a request upon which the necessary arrangements to do so can and will be made. And whatever delay there has been to date in Trump’s personal review of the classified materials, the seven months that remain before trial is more than ample time for him to do so,” it said.
A Justice Department official claimed that a Trump attorney certified last year that all records with secret markings had been returned.
Trump’s attorneys had submitted a motion last week to dismiss the Manhattan district attorney’s hush-money case against him, as well as a motion to postpone his current $250 million civil fraud trial until after the election.
Trump was scheduled to testify in the lawsuit on Monday.
The former president maintains that the four criminal proceedings against him and the civil fraud case are all politically driven witch hunts, and he also denies any wrongdoing.
Stay informed! Receive breaking news blasts directly to your inbox for free. Subscribe here. https://www.oann.com/alerts