The big news from Thursday, of course, is the superseding indictment against Donald Trump and his co-defendants. But it wasn’t the only news in the federal classified documents case. On top of a separate filing from special counsel Jack Smith that raises questions about trial timing — which I just discussed here — yet another submission contains something remarkable to match the remarkable new indictment.
That is, in the Justice Department’s latest protective order motion, prosecutors say the former president wants something unheard of: to discuss classified information at his private properties, such as Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster. Put differently, he wants to discuss the alleged crime at the alleged scene of the crime.
The request prompted the government to reply with the lawyerly equivalent of “Are you kidding me?”
Instead of saying that, exactly, Smith’s team wrote to Judge Aileen Cannon:
The government is not aware of any case in which a defendant has been permitted to discuss classified information in a private residence, and such exceptional treatment would not be consistent with the law.
Prosecutors later observed in the filing that it’s “particularly striking that he seeks permission to do so in the very location at which he is charged with willfully retaining the documents charged in this case.”
What the law requires, Smith’s filing points out, is that the sensitive information at issue needs to be “processed, stored, used, or discussed in an accredited sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF).” The filing goes on to note that Trump’s personal properties “are not lawful locations for the discussion of classified information, any more than they would be for any private citizen.”
The defense’s response to the motion is due within a couple of weeks, and we’ll see what Trump says. But as it stands now, the issue running through the motion is the same one that’s been running through the entire case: Does Trump get special treatment?
Thinking he should is what got Cannon into trouble in the first place, during the previous civil litigation, when she effectively sought to jam up the classified documents case for Trump before he was charged.
She hasn’t rendered similarly erroneous rulings since Trump was indicted — but he keeps tempting her to do so.
