U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan told prosecutors on Wednesday to give former President Donald Trump’s lawyers information from a separate probe into his former Vice President Mike Pence’s handling of classified documents.
Trump, the current Republican presidential nominee, faces four felony counts in the Justice Department’s case against him in Washington, D.C., after he allegedly tried to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory in the aftermath of his loss, which culminated in the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges and claimed the case is politically motivated against him.
The former president’s lawyers argued that information from Pence’s probe could be relevant to their defense as it shows that the former vice president has “an incentive to curry favor with authorities” and implicate Trump while facing an investigation into classified documents found in his Indiana home in January 2023.
Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team said it had no involvement in the Pence probe and has “no discoverable information” on the case “beyond what has been publicly reported.”
Nevertheless, Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s federal election subversion case, requested that Smith’s team find and produce any additional Justice Department records on the investigation.
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“Defendant is correct that information suggesting a potential witness’s motives for implicating him may be material,” Chutkan wrote in her order.
Prosecutors were also asked to produce information relating to any details Pence was given during a meeting with military officials about security measures that would be in place at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Additionally, they needed to share materials that Trump’s director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, reviewed before he was interviewed by prosecutors.
The decision is only a partial win for Trump’s team as there was a lot of other information that they sought out, which Chutkan said they failed to persuade was relevant to the former president’s defense. This information included documents related to the 2020 election and the January 6 riot, including information related to security at the Capitol building and any details about undercover government agents who may have been there.
Trump also wanted a complete version of the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election and information on foreign actors’ efforts to influence the 2020 election to support his lawyers’ argument that “Trump and others acted in good faith even if certain reports were ultimately determined to be inaccurate.”
Chutkan, however, said information on foreign entities working to influence the American public in 2020 had no bearing on Trump’s 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,” Chutkan wrote in her order.
Trump was indicted by a grand jury, which Pence testified before, in August 2023 on conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights.
In June 2023, the Justice Department informed Pence’s lawyers that he would not face criminal charges in his classified documents probe. However, there wasn’t an expectation that he would face charges as there is no evidence to suggest that Pence intentionally hid about a dozen classified documents from the government or even knew they were in his home.
This article includes reporting from The Associated Press.
