Last Monday, Special Counsel Jack Smith responded to a recent motion from Donald Trump’s legal team to delay the classified documents trial until after the 2024 election, arguing that there was “no reason” to postpone the May 2024 trial date, CBS News reported.
In a motion filed with the US District Court in Southern Florida on October 4, Trump’s attorneys requested that the trial be postponed until November 2024 at the soonest, citing scheduling conflicts, delays in the discovery process, and inadequate facilities for reviewing classified discovery.
In his response filed last Monday, the special counsel asked US District Judge Aileen Cannon to deny the defense’s motion, arguing that Trump’s legal team failed to provide “credible justification” for the delay.
Smith addressed the defense’s claim that prosecutors are slow-walking the release of materials in the case, calling it “unfounded.” He also said Trump’s lawyers’ claims that they are unable to review the classified materials were “distorted and exaggerated.”
Federal prosecutors said the “vast majority” of the classified documents collected during the investigation into the case are available to Trump’s legal team and his two co-defendants Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira.
Smith also disputed the defense’s claims about the non-classified information collected during the investigation, calling them “inaccurate.”
According to the filing, Trump and his co-defendants “repeatedly distorted the comprehensive, organized, and timely unclassified discovery” produced by the federal government “in service of an attack” on the prosecution’s prompt and thorough production of materials to allege that the federal government is being non-compliant. However, Smith wrote, “the facts prove otherwise.”
While the special counsel acknowledged that Trump is entitled to classified discovery to challenge the prosecution’s allegations that the documents he retained at Mar-a-Lago included information on national defense, Smith argued that the “great majority” of allegations against the former president rely on unclassified evidence.
He argued that the question of whether classified documents were retained at Mar-a-Lago “is not in dispute.” What is disputed is how and why the documents were taken and what Trump intended to do with them, Smith wrote.
