Special Counsel Jack Smith recently attempted in a new court filing with U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, to convince her to rule against former President Donald Trump’s motion for document production by citing a case she previously won as a federal prosecutor.
Cannon, “who was nominated to the bench by Trump, is due to decide on whether the former president’s counsel should receive a host of government documents to try to prove their complaint that the charges against the presumed 2024 Republican nominee are politically motivated,” Newsweek reported on Tuesday.
Despite already having 1.3 million papers, Trump’s team is attempting to force the Department of Justice to provide more. The Biden administration is allegedly carrying out a “selective prosecution” in the probe, to which Trump has entered not guilty pleas to 40 charges, according to The Daily Beast.
Smith believes that Trump and his attorneys are trying to postpone the trial as long as possible, hoping to do so until after the 2024 election. In the event that Trump wins, he may direct the DOJ to drop the federal prosecution involving confidential information against him as soon as he takes office.
Newsweek adds: “In February court filings, Smith’s team has noted that Cannon—who has frequently faced criticism for her rulings that have favored Trump in the federal case— previously won a case while arguing that such fishing expeditions cannot take place without credible evidence.
In 2015, while working as a federal prosecutor in South Florida, Cannon worked on a sting operation that saw two men arrested for plotting to rob a fake stash house containing half a million dollars worth of cocaine with AK-47s. One of the men tried to appeal his conviction based on the argument he was subject to an unfair “selective prosecution” as the majority of stash house stings target Black and Hispanic people.”
In 2021, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals gave a ruling that favored the federal prosecutors. At that time, Cannon had already been promoted to the bench. The appeals court referred to two cases that established the need for defendants to present evidence in order to be eligible to receive discovery and support their claims of persecution.
“Most of the motion to compel is devoted to the defendant’s request for discovery to support their unfounded allegation that the investigation and prosecution of this case have been tainted by political bias, which is a straightforward claim of selective prosecution governed by rigorous discovery standards,” Smith wrote.
“A request to discover such material is, instead, ‘governed by well-settled and binding precedent in [Armstrong] and United States v. Jordan,” Smith noted further, about the previous federal court rulings.
“That precedent imposes a ‘rigorous standard’ requiring a defendant to produce some evidence tending to show the existence of the essential elements of a selective prosecution claim—discriminatory effect and discriminatory purpose,’” the filing argued further.
