According to reports, former President Donald Trump learned on Wednesday, June 21, which government prosecutors were designated to depose against him in the alleged mishandling of classified documents case.
The Justice Department publicized “grand jury testimony of witnesses who will testify for the government at the trial of this case” as part of the trial’s pre-trial proceedings.
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
In the DOJ’s response, neither the witnesses’ names nor the topics of their grand jury testimony were mentioned.
On Monday, June 19, a federal judge presiding over this case prohibited the former president from disclosing any documents delivered to his legal team by federal prosecutors.
“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.
In addition, the order stated in black ink that Trump and his legal team have no right to disclose any of the sensitive information in “any public filing or in open court without notice to, and agreement from, the United States, or prior approval from the Court.”
Additionally, the defense counsel has been instructed to maintain custody of every document. In addition, it stipulates that all materials must be eliminated or returned to the U.S. government within the first ninety days following the conclusion of the case.
According to the Daily Wire, the descendants are expressly and plainly forbidden from making reproductions of the documents. However, it is perfectly acceptable for them to take notes on the material, as long as these notes are stored securely.
As anticipated, Trump pled not guilty in federal court to 37 counts of mishandling classified documents, as charged by special counsel Jack Smith. In the event that Trump is found guilty on these charges, Trump, President Joe Biden’s chief rival in next year’s presidential election, could face more than ten or even twenty years behind bars.
However, a former Trump counsel argued last week that there is a chance the case will never even go to trial because of prosecutorial misconduct.
Timothy Parlatore, who appeared on “The Ingraham Angle,” argued that he believes the case contains fundamentally essential laws, specifically regarding the grand jury procedure and attorney-client privilege. Even further, Parlatore stated that he believes this could result in the entire case being thrown out the window.
Trump’s attorneys should “attack the conduct of the entire investigation and demonstrate through death by a thousand cuts why this entire investigation is irreparably tainted by government misconduct,” according to Parlatore, who continued: “The case should be dismissed or, at the very least, the prosecutor should be disqualified.”
A portion of the transcript appears 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.