Former President Donald Trump intends to introduce classified intelligence assessments on foreign interference in the 2016 and 2020 elections into his Washington, D.C. federal election subversion case, asserting that the documents will justify his actions in the aftermath of his 2020 electoral defeat. In the Thursday night filing, Trump's legal team objected to the special counsel's redactions of the submitted classified discovery and characterizations of their relevance as "limited" and "tangential," arguing that his notice demonstrates that "'the government appears to have looked with tunnel vision at limited issues it believed were relevant.'" In doing so, Trump's lawyers wrote in the filing, "The Office was wrong."
"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," they continued. "President 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." The former president will also put forward classified information pertaining to "the biased and politicized nature of the intelligence assessments," aiming to discredit the prosecution's allegations against him and prove that he "acted at all times in good faith and on the belief that he was doing what he had been elected to do."
Legal experts appeared to express skepticism online about how Trump intends to use the proposed classified evidence. "Trump declares his intention to introduce classified information in the DC case. Mostly appears to be IC assessments of foreign interference. This should be interesting," national security attorney Bradley Moss wrote on X. Former federal prosecutor Brandon Van Grack, who served on special counsel Bob Mueller's team, added: "I look forward to Former President Trump admitting the Mueller Report into evidence."
