Washington — Special counsel Jack Smith has delivered the initial set of classified materials to former President Donald Trump and his legal team as part of the discovery process in the case concerning the former president’s handling of sensitive government records after leaving the White House.
In a filing on Thursday, Smith and his team informed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon that they had provided the first batch of classified discovery on Wednesday, the same day Cannon issued a protective order relating to the classified information disclosed to Trump and his lawyers ahead of the trial scheduled to commence in May.
Prosecutors have stated that Trump’s lawyers, who possess interim clearances, are able to access certain sensitive materials, but other documents necessitate “final clearances with additional necessary read-ins into various compartments.” Highly classified information is often “compartmentalized” to restrict access to a limited number of officials.
The first batch of materials includes documents with classification markings that were stored at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s property in South Florida, as well as other classified information “generated or obtained in the government’s investigation,” such as reports and transcripts of witness interviews.
Prosecutors expect to provide more classified materials in due course.
The Justice Department has already given Trump and his co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, five batches of unclassified material. Prosecutors intend to provide additional unclassified witness materials and agent communications on an ongoing basis. The five sets amount to approximately 1.28 million pages of documents, provided between late June and early September.
In addition, the Justice Department has supplied what Trump and his co-defendants estimate to be over 3,700 days, or more than 10 years, of surveillance footage. Prosecutors dispute this calculation, stating a significantly lower number.
“The Government represents that, at this time, it has produced all search warrants and the filtered, scoped returns; all witness memorialization in the Special Counsel Office’s possession as of our most recent production (September 1, 2023); all grand jury testimony; and all CCTV footage obtained in the Government’s investigation,” wrote lawyers from the special counsel’s office.
The former president faces 40 charges related to the alleged mishandling of classified documents discovered at Mar-a-Lago after leaving office in January 2021. Thirty-two of the charges against Trump involve willful retention of national defense information pertaining to specific documents with classification markings that the government claims to have retrieved from his South Florida property in 2022.
Trump’s aide, Nauta, is facing a total of eight charges, while De Oliveira, the property manager at Mar-a-Lago, is charged with four counts. All three defendants, Trump, Nauta, and De Oliveira, have pleaded not guilty to all charges.
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