Inside the DOJ’s aggressive effort to get Trump on documents charges – Washington Examiner

The Justice Department under the Biden administration was more aggressive when pursuing former President Donald Trump in the classified documents case than previously known, according to newly released court filings.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon on Tuesday unsealed hundreds of documents related to Trump’s 40-count federal indictment in Florida over his handling of sensitive records retrieved from his Mar-a-Lago resort home after he left the White House in January 2021. The unsealing comes months after arguments between special counsel Jack Smith and Trump’s defense team.

The indictment against former President Donald Trump is photographed on Friday, June 9, 2023. A pretrial conference Tuesday, July 18, to discuss procedures for handling classified information will represent the first courtroom arguments in the case before U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon since Trump was indicted five weeks ago. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick, File)

Smith and the Biden DOJ said they wanted the documents censored in order to keep witnesses from being identified. Cannon even dinged Smith by expressing “concern” the special counsel’s office had sought redactions of information in the newly unsealed filings after previously giving the green light for that information to be published in an earlier court filing.

A Washington Examiner review of hundreds of freshly unsealed federal court records paints a picture of a far more aggressive effort than previously known by both the National Archives and Records Administration and the DOJ to crack down on Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents despite direct and continued correspondence between Trump lawyers and NARA officials.

For example, Trump lawyers submitted copies of email exchanges with NARA general counsel Gary M. Stern on June 30, 2021, just five months after Trump left the White House.

Stern said it had been “three weeks” since a Trump lawyer provided an update about sensitive documents Trump kept about North Korea at Mar-a-Lago, and that then-Archivist David Ferriero, who was appointed under former President Barack Obama, pushed him to “seek assistance of the Department of Justice.”

Response from NARA general counsel Gary Stern to Trump attorneys on June 30, 2021.

Stern’s emails to Trump attorneys were attached to the former president’s latest motion to dismiss the classified documents case based on prosecutorial abuse and denial of due process. Trump has repeatedly accused the Biden White House of colluding with NARA to bring about the criminal case, and the new emails suggest Ferriero may be a conduit to that theory.

Trump lawyers wrote that NARA’s “politically motivated malicious intent is demonstrated by Ferriero’s August 2022 social media post congratulating his former agency for its role in the Mar-a-Lago raid.”

Eleven days after the unprecedented FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, Ferriero posted to Facebook a link to an article published by UNC-Chapel Hill titled, “Don’t Mess with the Archivists.”

Former NARA Archivist David Ferriero reposted this story to his Facebook profile on Aug. 19, 2022.

The newly released documents also revealed a Dec. 22, 2022, grand jury transcript from an interview with former Trump attorney Timothy Parlatore, who accused prosecutors at the time of not following the rules of attorney-client privilege.

DOJ lawyers Julie Edelstein, Brett Reynolds, and Anne McNamara pressed Parlatore about why Trump didn’t allow him to discuss their private conversations if he was cooperating with their investigations.

“The question you just asked seems to indicate that, for somebody to be cooperative, they should waive their attorney-client privilege, which is absolutely wrong,” Parlatore said, after objecting to the line of questioning.

Reynolds chimed in to remind Parlatore that he was the witness to the grand jury, and Edelstein argued it was her obligation to ask that line of questioning.

“You made a representation to this grand jury about what was said at a meeting,” Edelstein said, “and I asked you the basis of that representation.” Parlatore again said the question was improper, and his testimony ended a short time later.

The classified documents trial against Trump, his aide Walt Nauta, and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira was supposed to get underway this week at the federal courthouse in Miami, but Cannon indefinitely delayed the trial earlier this month because she needed more time to handle pretrial motions.

Pictured is the Alto Lee Adams, Sr. U.S. Courthouse where U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon held a pretrial conference to discuss procedures for handling classified information in the case against former President Donald Trump, Tuesday, July 18, 2023, in Fort Pierce, Florida.(AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)

Cannon also has yet to determine which classified evidence will be presented at the trial, or how to do so in a way that protects the sensitive materials. Due to the number of delays, some legal experts have said the public may not know exactly when a trial could be underway until late July or sometime in August.

Nauta, 41, is accused of taking dozens of boxes from a storage room at Trump’s property to Trump’s residential quarters as investigators sought to retrieve all the classified documents from the property, along with allegations he planned to delete security footage to obstruct the investigation. He has pleaded not guilty to the eight charges he faces.

The newly released documents from Tuesday included fresh images of Nauta carrying boxes around Trump’s Florida property. The photos are dated June 1, 2022, shortly before a Trump lawyer was scheduled to canvas the storage room for any documents with classified markings to be returned to the federal government. Another partially redacted image above Nauta’s photos showed two men in suits carrying boxes at Trump’s Florida property.

Trump aide Walt Nauta is seen carrying boxes on security footage on June 1, 2022.
Two unidentified men carry boxes at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort (date unknown)

Cannon held a hearing Wednesday morning over Nauta’s claim that the prosecution against him has been discriminatory and vindictive, in part because there were other people who helped move boxes of Trump’s documents around the private club who were not charged.

The judge also held a second hearing later in the afternoon, where defense lawyers in the case were expected to argue that the charges should be dismissed against the three defendants on the grounds that prosecutors did not clearly lay out in the indictment the laws that they are accused of violating.

Donald Trump awaits the start of a hearing in New York City Criminal Court, Thursday, February 15, 2024. A New York judge says former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial will go ahead as scheduled, with jury selection starting on March 25. (Jefferson Siegel for The New York Times via AP, Pool)

Trump faces 40 federal charges in the case, including willful retention of national defense information, obstruction, and false statements. He has been charged separately in three other criminal cases and faces closing arguments next week in the 34-count New York hush money and business record falsification case, the first of four criminal cases to head to a trial.

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The former president’s other two cases, a state election interference case in Georgia and a federal election interference case in Washington, D.C., have been indefinitely delayed due to appeals of pretrial rulings.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to all 88 charges he faces in four criminal indictments as he mounts another bid for the Oval Office in November.

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