Earlier this week, the federal court presiding over the former president Donald Trump’s case involving confidential information delivered another crushing setback to the prosecution led by special counsel Jack Smith.
Prosecutors had asked for U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to ruthlessly reject defence counsel’ requests to withhold key records and documents from them during the discovery phase. According to The Western Journal, she ruled that the attempts by Smith’s team to limit discovery were founded on a “broad and unconvincing theory” as well as a “atextual” and “almost blithe” reading of the relevant federal statute.
Smith made the request after accusing Trump valet Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira of working together to illegally keep confidential materials at the former president’s South Florida resort.
In her Wednesday ruling, Cannon said the Office of Special Counsel too broadly interpreted the Classified Information Procedures Act, saying it did not comport with a plain reading of the statute.
She noted in her ruling that Smith’s team wants to restrict Nauta and De Oliveira “almost entirely from reviewing classified discovery to be produced in the case, and then placing the burden to justify otherwise on defense counsel.”
In support of their request, Smith’s team referenced Section 3 of the CIPA law, which says that “the court shall issue an order to protect against the disclosure of any classified information disclosed by the United States to any defendant in any criminal case in a district court of the United States,” upon motion of the United States.
Trump appointee Cannon said that a straightforward reading of the statute does not support Smith’s argument that defence counsel should all be prohibited from accessing papers that will be used as evidence in court to show that they improperly handled classified documents.
The judge pointed out that there is a distinction made by the CIPA statute between the solicitors and the accused.
“In the OSC’s opinion, even though the term “defendant” appears in Section 3 and Congress explicitly mentioned “any attorney of the defendant” in another section of CIPA as being different from “the defendant,” as stated in CIPA § 2, the Court must nonetheless interpret the term “the defendant” in Section 3 as meaning “attorney for the defendant” and simultaneously interpret Section 3 to exclude “the defendant” who is being charged with a crime, at least in situations where the government provides evidence to oppose to such disclosure pretrial,” the ruling stated.
The special counsel’s stance was then referred to by her as a “broad and atextual interpretation” of the law.
Citing Section 4 of the CIPA Act, Cannon continued to advise Smith’s prosecutors that they would need to limit the defence attorneys’ access to classified documents on a document-by-document basis if they wished to continue doing so, as reported by The Western Journal.
The court “may authorise the United States to delete specified items of classified information from documents to be made available to the defendant through discovery,” according to a portion of the clause.
So once more, we are left with the OSC’s general and unpersuasive theory, according to which the Court should redefine the term “defendant” to effectively mean “defence counsel to the exclusion of defendant. The Court is unwilling to comply,” Cannon penned.