Donald Trump’s legal team is asking for access to Biden-era White House records, including from the National Security Council and the White House Counsel’s Office, as he attempts to build a defense against charges he mishandled more than 30 sensitive national security records after he left the presidency.
If the judge allows it, Trump’s team would be aiming for sweeping access to core advisers around President Joe Biden and their communications, at a time when investigators were looking at Trump’s cavalier approach to state secrets and demands by the federal government to return documents he kept.
The National Security Council “was responsible for the creation and handling of many of the documents at issue, and the Special Counsel’s Office will be required to rely on personnel from the National Security Council at trial to demonstrate that the documents it authored are classified and constitute information ‘relating to the national defense,’” Trump’s team argued to Judge Aileen Cannon in his motion for access to more government records for his defense.
His lawyers also said the White House Counsel’s Office should also be turning over records for his case, because they “repeatedly supported the investigative activities.”
In the filing Tuesday night, attorneys for the former president accused special counsel Jack Smith and his team of “partisan election interference,” for not providing them what Trump’s team says could be evidence he could use in the classified documents case in Florida.
Established rules govern what defense teams can see before trial, giving them access to the case prosecutors have built through a grand jury. But Trump’s team is now asking the court to widen that set of information into several other parts of the Biden administration, in addition to the Justice Department that charged the case.
…
Read the full article here