Jack Smith, the US special investigator in the case of classified documents against former US President Donald Trump, confirmed that there is no reason to consider the request to postpone the trial date submitted by the defense team until after the upcoming presidential elections.
Smith said that there is no legal or factual reason to postpone the date of the trial, refuting the “possible” reasons cited by the defense team for Trump and Walt Nauta, the co-accused of helping to hide some confidential documents from investigators.
The investigation team, which seeks to conduct the trial in mid-December, accused the two defendants of giving a “misleading” picture of the huge amount of evidence handed over by the Public Prosecution in the case, as Trump’s defense team demanded more time to review this amount of evidence as a reason to postpone the trial date.
Smith’s team also confirmed that while some 800,000 pages of classified documents were handed over to the defence, a third of these pages had no evidentiary content, adding that only 4,500 pages were “key” in the case as legal evidence.
The Public Prosecution described the defense’s claims as “misleading” regarding the time it would take to search the confiscated surveillance camera recordings, which amounted to nine months, noting that the recordings were only footage from selected cameras, many of which were not recorded continuously, They date back to selected dates from the nine-month period recorded by the cameras.
Trump on Keeping Secret Documents: I’ve been very busy
Prosecutors said only two lawyers for the defendants’ clients had applied for security clearances so far to look at classified materials related to the case. The issue of access to sensitive government documents is one of the complications in Trump’s historic trial, but the special investigator confirmed that mid-December is a reasonable date for the start of the trial.
The prosecution also criticized Trump’s lawyer’s suggestion that a fair jury could not be appointed on time, as Trump seeks to return to the White House before his trial begins.
The prosecution said it depended on the “power of the court to craft a comprehensive and effective jury selection process, and on prospective jurors’ ability and willingness to decide cases on the evidence presented to them, guided by the court’s legal instructions”.
He added: “Certainly the government recognizes that jury selection here may require additional protocols (such as a questionnaire) and may take longer than in other cases, but these are reasons to start the process sooner rather than later.”
This comes ahead of a hearing scheduled for next Tuesday to look into the case, where the prosecution and defense will discuss how to handle classified materials in the case.
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2023-07-14 01:38:27
