Trump demands Biden administration papers in bid to argue ‘political bias’ in classified documents case

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In a new court filing, lawyers for former president Donald Trump argued that the federal case against him for allegedly holding onto classified documents is “politically motivated.”

The documents, which were filed Tuesday, lay out the possible legal strategy Trump’s defence team plans to use to combat the criminal charges against him.

“One of the ways in which President Trump will challenge that testimony is by demonstrating that the Intelligence Community has operated with a bias against him dating back to at least the 2019 whistleblower complaint relating to his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy,” the documents state, a reference to the case that led to Mr Trump’s first impeachment.

The criminal case against Mr Trump accuses him of illegally mishandling classified documents, holding onto swaths of them after he left office. Mr Trump was indicted in June 2023, with an FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago turning up boxes of sensitive government documents stowed away all over the Florida property.

In Tuesday’s filing, Mr Trump’s team lambasted President Biden and the Department of Justice, criticising the case as a “crusade” rooted in “bias and political animus” with the intention of keeping him out of the White House.

They are seeking to obtain communications between the Justice Department and the Biden administration, claiming without evidence the two are colluding to disrupt his 2024 presidential campaign.

“The Special Counsel’s Office has disregarded basic discovery obligations and DOJ policies in an effort to support the Biden Administration’s egregious efforts to weaponize the criminal justice system in pursuit of an objective that President Biden cannot achieve on the campaign trail: slowing down President Trump’s leading campaign in the 2024 presidential election,” the filing states.