Left: Former President Donald Trump, center, sits at the defense table at New York Supreme Court, Dec. 7, 2023, in New York City. (AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez, Pool, File)./Right: Special counsel Jack Smith speaks about an indictment of former President Donald Trump, Aug. 1, 2023. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File).
In a routine filing Thursday updating the judge in the Mar-a-Lago prosecution on prosecutors’ compliance with discovery obligations, special counsel Jack Smith revealed that his office interviewed someone as recently as one day earlier in connection with the government’s Espionage Act case.
Defense attorneys for President Donald Trump, Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira, and Trump valet Waltine “Walt” Nauta have been provided “a fourteenth production of unclassified discovery.” That piece of discovery consists of nine pages, including the “memorialization of an interview conducted on March 6, 2024,” that is, Wednesday.
It is not yet clear who sat for this interview.
In recent days, the prosecution and the defense have clashed on various issues, one of which pertains to the “outing” of government witnesses. While Smith maintains that the Trump team was “unable to show concern or sympathy” for the witnesses, defense attorneys Todd Blanche and Christopher Kise replied that they are merely “following the law.”
“The Defendants take no position on any particular request for redaction of certain information. However, similar to earlier failed attempts by the Special Counsel’s Office to redact or seal public materials in this case […] the Office offers only sparse information and generalized arguments in support of the most recent sealing motion,” the lawyers recently told U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee. “These cursory references to broad classes of information that the Office claims raise hypothetical concerns do not ‘set forth ‘the factual and legal basis for departing from’ the court’s open-access policy.””
The lawyers said Smith’s claim that they “do not care about the safety and security of witnesses” was an “absurd” statement.
The Special Counsel’s Office argued that the judge made a “clear error” when she ruled last month that Smith had not, under a heightened First Amendment standard, “set forth a sufficient factual or legal basis warranting deviation from the strong presumption in favor of public access to the records at issue.”
When the special counsel repeated those arguments during a grueling 4-hour scheduling conference and hearing last Friday, he was reportedly “visibly shocked” that Judge Cannon still appeared to be leaning towards naming dozens of government witnesses, even in the face of a possible appeal.
As of Thursday, the judge has yet to rule on pending defense motions to compel and Smith’s pending motion for consideration on the “sealing and/or redaction requests” issue.
Read the brief update on shared discovery here.
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