Special counsel Jack Smith on Monday opposed a request by former President Donald Trump to postpone the trial over his alleged mishandling of classified documents until after the 2024 presidential election.
Trump’s legal team has said that the Justice Department hasn’t met its commitments to provide all the evidence in the case promptly, a claim Smith called out as baseless in a new court filing.
“The defendants have repeatedly distorted the comprehensive, organized, and timely unclassified discovery that the Government has produced, in service of an attack on the promptness and thoroughness of the productions and an allegation that the Government is in ‘ongoing non-compliance,’” Smith wrote. “The facts prove otherwise.”
The trial is currently scheduled for next May.
Trump’s lawyers claimed in a filing last week that they haven’t been able to access the full classified discovery, citing a lack of secure facilities for handling the evidence in this case, among other things.
But the special counsel said while the former president should get access to classified information to be able to challenge, for instance, the DOJ’s proof concerning the allegation that the files he kept at his Florida estate included national defense information, most of the allegations listed in the indictment are based on unclassified evidence which they have already obtained.
“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,” Smith wrote.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges in the case.
Smith’s filing came in response to a motion by Trump’s lawyers Christopher Kise and Todd Blanche requesting that the trial be moved to a date after the Nov. 5, 2024, presidential election, citing the discovery issues and scheduling conflicts with his other trials, including his federal election interference one, which is also overseen by Smith and is slated for next March.
“The March 4, 2023 trial date in the District of Columbia, and the underlying schedule in that case, currently require President Trump and his lawyers to be in two places at once,” Kise and Blanche wrote last week.
Smith noted that Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over the classified documents trial, has already rejected an earlier attempt by Trump to schedule the trial following the 2024 presidential contest.