According to reports on Wednesday, June 21, former President Donald Trump found out who the government prosecutors appointed to testify against him in the case regarding the alleged mishandling of classified documents.
This news branched out from the Justice Department’s publicization of “grand jury testimony of witnesses who will testify for the government at the trial of this case” as a part of the pre-trial.
JUST IN: DOJ says it has made its first production of trial discovery to Donald Trump and his team — which means (per the below) he now knows who’s going to testify against him, and roughly what they’re going to say. pic.twitter.com/9XgeHplMAE
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) June 22, 2023
With this, the DOJ’s submission did not address the witnesses by name, nor what they spoke about during their grand jury testimony.
A federal judge, who was handling this case, blocked the former president from disclosing any documentation that are handed to his team of attorneys by federal prosecutors, on Monday, June 19.
“The Discovery Materials, along with any information derived therefrom, shall not be disclosed to the public or the news media, or disseminated on any news or social media platform, without prior notice to and consent of the United States or approval of the Court,” Federal Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart stated in his order.
Furthermore, the order stated in black ink that Trump and his legal team have no right to disclose any of the material, due to the high sensitivity of its contents, in “any public filing or in open court without notice to, and agreement from, the United States, or prior approval from the Court.”
The counsel of defense has also been ordered to keep every last one of the documents safe and sound in their custody. Additionally, it provides that after the conclusion of the case, all the materials must either be destroyed or returned to the U.S. government within the first ninety days post-conclusion.
The Daily Wire reports that the descendants are explicitly, and clearly, forbidden from creating any copies of the documents. However, they are perfectly allowed to take notes regarding the material, on account that these notes are stored safely and securely.
Trump, as expected, pleaded not guilty in federal court to his charge of thirty-seven counts of mishandling of classified documents by special counsel Jack Smith. In the event that Trump is found guilty on these counts, Trump, aka President Joe Biden’s biggest competitor in next year’s presidential election, could face more than ten, even twenty years in prison.
However, last week a former Trump attorney stepped up and argued that there is a possibility the case will never even make it to trial due to its prosecutorial misconduct.
Timothy Parlatore, who made an appearance on “The Ingraham Angle,” debated that he believes the case has important fundamental laws, specifically over the grand jury process and breaks the attorney-client privilege. Parlatore even said that he has a belief that this could end in the entire case being knocked out the window.
Parlatore stated that Trump’s attorneys should just “attack the conduct of the entire investigation and show through death by a thousand cuts why this entire investigation is irreparably tainted by government misconduct,” then continued to say; “The case, therefore, should be dismissed or, at a minimum, the prosecutor should be disqualified.”
A bit of the transcript is printed below:
TIMOTHY PARLATORE: You know, litigating these types of cases against DOJ, as I usually do, this team acted so radically different from every professional U.S. Attorney’s office that I’ve ever dealt with. They’ve shown no regard whatsoever for attorney-client privilege. And it’s more than just the issue of Evan Corcoran. I went before the grand jury myself, not subpoenaed, I went in voluntarily… They wanted to hear about the searches that we did for additional documents. They wanted some staffer from Mar-a-Lago to go down who wasn’t going to be able to really talk about it, so I voluntarily went in because as a criminal lawyer, the opportunity to speak directly to the grand jury, I wanted that opportunity.
45 separate times. I can’t make that number up. I actually counted, 45 separate times, they asked me about my conversations with my client, and at one point we kept getting into this fight because they kept implying, “Oh, you’re keeping this from the grand jury. You won’t let them know this.”
LAURA INGRAHAM: Oh, my God. I mean, this just upends all of the attorney-client privilege ethics rules that I ever learned in law school.
TIMOTHY PARALTORE: It does. And I believe this case, there’s going to be serious litigation in the pretrial stage over prosecutorial misconduct by this team, which could entirely upend this case.
We may never get to a trial, we may never actually have to address any of the substantive issues because of the misconduct of Jack Smith and his team.
