Trump lawyers visit Justice Dept. as documents inquiry nears end
AG, deputy not among officials at meeting
Lawyers for former president Donald Trump met on Monday at the Justice Department with officials, including special counsel Jack Smith, two weeks after requesting a meeting to discuss their concerns about Smith’s investigations into Trump, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The meeting did not include Attorney General Merrick Garland or Lisa Monaco, the deputy attorney general, and it is unclear what precise subjects were discussed. But the visit came amid indications that prosecutors in the special counsel’s office were approaching the end of their inquiry into the former president’s handling of classified documents. It also came at a time when Trump’s advisers have concluded that there might not be much more time to stave off charges, the people said.
The lawyers — James Trusty, John Rowley, and Lindsey Halligan — left the Justice Department after nearly two hours. They declined to speak to reporters.
Shortly after their visit, Trump posted a message on his social media platform, Truth Social, suggesting that his legal team had at least discussed with him the possibility that he could be indicted.
“How can DOJ possibly charge me, who did nothing wrong,” Trump wrote in all capital letters.
Tim Parlatore, a lawyer who resigned last month from representing Trump, said the former president’s legal team has harbored worries for some time about how prosecutors working for Smith have conducted the classified document inquiry.
“I’ve long had concerns about the manner in which DOJ personnel conducted this investigation,” Parlatore said. “Regardless of what the evidence shows, if your prosecution team has engaged in misconduct, that’s a relevant factor to consider in making any charging decisions, particularly in a case with significant political magnitude.”
Peter Carr, a spokesman for Smith, declined to comment.
In a one-page letter to Garland, which Trump posted on his Truth Social account on May 23, the lawyers did not cite any specific complaints by his legal team, but instead broadly asserted that Trump had been treated unfairly by the Justice Department through the investigations led by Smith. Along with the classified documents case, prosecutors under Smith are also scrutinizing efforts by Trump and his aides to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The letter to Garland was an abbreviated version of a longer one that contained a more detail account of the concerns by Trump’s lawyers, according to two people familiar with the matter. Those included the ways in which grand juries have been used in the special counsel’s investigations and attempts to strong-arm defense lawyers involved in the cases, the people said.
Trusty, who worked at the Justice Department for more than two decades, knows Smith well: The two worked with each other a decade ago, when Trusty was a high-ranking prosecutor in the department’s criminal division and Smith was the head of the public integrity unit.
The Trump legal team’s visit to the Justice Department came as signs have emerged that Smith could soon make a decision about whether to seek charges in the documents case. The status of his other line of inquiry, into Trump’s efforts to reverse his election loss and how they contributed to the assault on the Capitol by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, remains less clear.
Trump expects to face charges in the documents investigation, according to people who have spoken to him, although that does not mean he has been assured that charges are pending.
Prosecutors said in legal documents last year that they were investigating Trump’s handling of classified documents that he took with him when he left office and whether he obstructed the government’s efforts to retrieve them. He voluntarily returned two batches of documents last year, and FBI agents retrieved more in a search in August of Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida.
In his Truth Social post, Trump compared his case with that of President Biden, who was also found to have had classified documents in his possession from his time as vice president and who is also under scrutiny by a special counsel. Trump also mentioned the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server.
The initial letter from his lawyers to Garland was directly confrontational, accusing officials at the Justice Department of showing favoritism to Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, who is under criminal investigation by the department.
By sending the letter, Trump was relying on a frequently used playbook, in which he suggests a judge or a prosecutor is treating him unfairly by the act of investigating him.