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Donald Trump wants to suppress 15 boxes of presidential papers that form a major part of the classified documents case against the former president.
Trump had held onto the boxes in his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida for over a year after leaving the White House.
Trump's lawyers filed a motion on Thursday to have any mention of the boxes removed from the case because of what they allege is prosecutorial misconduct.
Trump is facing 40 federal charges over allegations he retained classified papers after leaving the White House in January 2021 and then obstructed efforts by the relevant authorities to have them returned.
Trump, frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has pleaded not guilty to all charges and strongly denies any wrongdoing.
Newsweek sought email comment from the Department of Justice and Trump's attorney on Friday.
Trump's attorneys filed a motion to "suppress the '15 Boxes' based on prosecutorial misconduct resulting in due process violations, impermissible pre-indictment delay, and grand jury abuses".
Alternatively, they want the entire indictment dismissed.
Although the contents of the 15 boxes are redacted in court documents for national security reasons, Trump's lawyers informed a congressional committee by writing in April 2023 that the boxes mostly contained briefings for calls with foreign leaders.
The U.S. National Archives spent months trying to get the boxes back from Trump. His alleged refusal prompted a criminal investigation and he eventually handed them back to the archive.
In December 2022, two Trump lawyers, Tim Parlatore and Jim Trusty, asked the National Archives for access to the 15 boxes.
The request was granted several weeks later.
The boxes, according to the letter they sent to the congressional committees, contained a mixture of documents from the White House that were grouped by date and included newspapers, magazines, notes, letters and daily presidential schedules.
National Archive officials had removed classified documents from the boxes and inserted placeholder pages that described the document they removed.
"That allowed Parlatore and Trusty to discern what the documents were, as well as what other materials in the boxes were in proximity ... The vast majority of placeholder inserts refer to briefings for phone calls with foreign leaders that were located near the schedule for those calls."
The letter described the then criminal investigation as "misguided" because Trump staff quickly loaded the boxes during Trump's exit from the White House in 2021.
The motion is one of 10 that Trump's lawyers filed to Judge Aileen Cannon on Thursday.
In another, in which Trump is seeking presidential immunity from prosecution, Trump's lawyers say that, if the 15 boxes are allowed into evidence, National Archive witnesses who are "providing trial testimony regarding, for example, the 15 Boxes, will be confronted with public displays of the agency's bias."
It states that Trump's defense team is entitled to obtain private communications by National Archive personnel to show this bias, "and in order to develop additional evidence of misconduct" by archive staff "in violation of the Presidential Records Act, due process, and President Trump's executive privilege."
In August 2022, Trump's Mar-a-Lago private members' club was raided by federal agents who recovered more than 100 documents marked as secret or confidential.
The prosecution is being led by Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith.
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About the writer
Sean O'Driscoll is a Newsweek Senior Crime and Courts Reporter based in Ireland. His focus is reporting on U.S. law. ... Read more