WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal judge overseeing the election interference case against Donald Trump directed prosecutors Wednesday to search for and provide to the former president's lawyers any Justice Department information related to a separate investigation into Mike Pence's handling of classified documents.
Trump's
lawyers had argued that that information could be relevant to their defense to
the extent it shows that Pence, Trump's vice president, had “an incentive to
curry favor with authorities” and implicate Trump while facing his own
investigation into the retention of classified documents in his Indiana home.
Special
counsel Jack Smith's team has said it had no involvement in the Pence
investigation and has “no discoverable information” on the case "beyond
what has been publicly reported.” But U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered
Smith's team to look for and produce any additional records on the
investigation, noting that defense lawyers are entitled to cite evidence of a
witness's uncharged conduct as a way to undermine that witness's credibility.
“Defendant
is correct that information suggesting a potential witness’s motives for
implicating him may be material,” Chutkan wrote.
The judge's
order, though, mostly rejected the categories of evidence that Trump had sought
from prosecutors, saying his lawyers failed to make the case that the
information was relevant to his defense against charges that he illegally
schemed to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
That
includes a wide swath of documents related to that election and the Jan. 6,
2021, riot including information related to security at the Capitol
and any details about undercover government agents who may have been there.
Trump also
unsuccessfully sought a complete version of the U.S. intelligence community's
assessment that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election, as
well as information regarding foreign actors’ efforts to influence the 2020
election to support the defense’s argument that “Trump and others acted in good
faith even if certain reports were ultimately determined to be inaccurate.”
But the
judge said details about foreign entities working to influence the American
public in 2020 had no bearing on the current case.
“Whether
Defendant sought to undermine public confidence in the election to legitimize
or otherwise further his criminal conspiracies does not depend on whether other
nations also tried to achieve similar results for their own purposes,” the
judge wrote.
Pence appeared before a grand jury investigating Trump
in April 2023 after a federal appeals court rejected an effort by Trump's
lawyers to block his testimony on executive privilege grounds. That June,
Justice Department officials informed his lawyers that he would not face any
criminal charges following the discovery months earlier of about a dozen
documents with classified markings at his home.
No evidence
has ever emerged to suggest that Pence intentionally hid documents from the
government or even knew they were in his home, so there was never an
expectation that he would face charges.
The two
other buckets of information that Chutkan directed prosecutors to produce
relate to any details Pence was given during a meeting with military officials
about security measures that would be in place at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6,
2021, and information that Trump's director of national intelligence reviewed
before he was interviewed by prosecutors.
It's unclear
when or even if the election interference case will reach trial in light of
a Supreme Court opinion from July that conferred broad
immunity on former presidents and narrowed the scope of allegations against
Trump.
Chutkan is
now tasked with determining which of the prosecution's claims against Trump can
remain part of the case and which must be discarded, a process that will almost
certainly result in further appeals.
If Trump is
elected, his new attorney general will presumably seek the dismissal of the
case.