Donald Trump Wants to Reveal Classified Intel in Court

Donald Trump wants to reveal classified information when he goes on trial for allegedly trying to steal the 2020 presidential election, his latest court submissions show.

Trump wants to introduce classified information about how foreign governments tried to influence the election and his efforts to stop it.

By doing so, Trump wants to establish that he was not trying to steal the 2020 election, as prosecutors have claimed, but was trying to protect the integrity of the election.

Legal arguments over including classified material could add months of delays to the case. This case is just one of four that he's involved in. He's pleaded not guilty and maintained his innocence in all four cases.

Newsweek has sought comment via email from Trump's legal team.

The submission before Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington, D.C., on Thursday states that Trump "will offer classified information at trial relating to foreign influence activities that impacted the 2016 and 2020 elections, as well as efforts by his administration to combat those activities."

"President Trump will also present classified information relating to the biased and politicized nature of the intelligence assessments that he and others rejected during the events in question," it reads.

It also states that his legal team has already alerted an office that handles classified information requests to inform them that Trump will need classified documents at trial.

His legal team's submission states that, between the classified information on foreign interference and the classified information on biased intelligence reports, "this evidence will undercut central theories of the prosecution and establish that President Trump acted at all times in good faith and on the belief that he was doing what he had been elected to do."

The submission notes that prosecutor, Jack Smith, has argued in legal submissions earlier this month that "the classified discovery issues" in this case are "limited," "tangential," "narrow," and "incidental" because "the charges...do not rely on classified materials."

"The Indictment in this case adopts classified assessments by the Intelligence Community and others that minimized, and at times ignored, efforts by foreign actors to influence and interfere with the 2020 election," Trump's lawyers wrote.

The submissions by Trump's attorneys John F. Lauro and Todd Blanche come on the same day that Smith's team was complaining, in a separate federal case, that Trump's legal team took 11 days to begin reviewing classified material allegedly found at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

Trump has pleaded not guilty before a Florida federal court to hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

In that Florida submission, Smith's team complained that Trump's lawyers are accusing prosecutors of not producing the classified documents fast enough while delaying their inspection of those same documents at a specially fitted secure room in Miami.

"Despite defendant Trump's accusations, defense counsel was hardly in a rush to review the Government's latest production of classified discovery," he wrote in a document submitted to federal judge Aileen Cannon on Thursday.

Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in the 2024 presidential race. Several legal commentators claim he is trying to delay his criminal trials so that he can exonerate himself if reelected president.

Preet Bharara, a former federal prosecutor, said that Trump likely has three options to avoid his two federal trials: pardoning himself, appointing a favorable attorney general, or claiming federal immunity.

Speaking on his Spotify podcast Stay Tuned With Preet, earlier this month, Bharara claimed that Trump is trying to delay his trials until after the presidential election and, if elected, try to escape the charges.