Trump Tries Same Legal Strategy in Classified Docs and 2020 Election Cases

Donald Trump’s ever-growing legal troubles in Florida and Washington, D.C., center on very different sets of facts — one concerning his handling of sensitive government records, the other on events surrounding the 2020 election.

But the legal strategies in both cases are expected to closely mirror one another. That’s according to his own preliminary court filings, the former president’s public statements and an in-depth readout from a source familiar with his lawyers’ strategizing.

Trump’s team has made it clear they will protest Special Counsel Jack Smith’s authority to prosecute him, dispute the underlying statutes at play in his criminal cases, and argue he cannot get a fair trial during a White House campaign where he’s trying to unseat the person in charge of the administration that’s prosecuting him.

“The government has had three years to investigate this,” a source familiar with the strategy of Trump’s legal team in the 2020 election case told The Messenger. “And what, are they going to ask for three months to go to trial? So you know, there has to be a degree of fairness built in. Because they're interfering in the election.”

“I think the goal is to interject the Department of Justice directly into the campaign,” the source added. “I think that's the ultimate objective.”

That argument echoes a July 10 filing by Trump’s team in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, in which the former president’s lawyers asked for an indefinite delay in the South Florida federal trial date, arguing he cannot get a fair hearing in front of a jury “during the pendency of a Presidential election cycle.”

Trump followed a pattern that has become familiar for him when he disclosed in a July 18 statement that he had received a “target letter” from the Justice Department and was expecting an imminent indictment in the 2020 election probe.

He’s used his social media platform, Truth Social, to lob insults and barbs at Smith, including again calling him “deranged” on Sunday in a post that also suggested in all-caps that his investigators were the ones who should be "prosecuted for MISCONDUCT."

Trump’s lawyers have telegraphed plans to mount a more formal challenge to Smith’s authority to bring charges, noting in their July 10 filing in the Mar-a-Lago documents case that they will be “pursuing Constitutional and statutory challenges relative to the authority of the Special Counsel to maintain this action.”

The Justice Department’s target letter Trump said was delivered to him in early June reportedly names three criminal charges: obstructing an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States; and Section 241 of the federal criminal code, which makes it illegal “to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person... in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”

Trump’s legal strategy in the 2020 election defense is likely to focus on arguments he was exercising his First Amendment rights in his capacity as president.

“The target letter does not include any suggestion of insurrection, incitement to riot or any kind of activity that would suggest, kind of, an overthrow of the government or anything like that. Zero,” the source familiar with Trump’s legal strategy told The Messenger.

“We're in uncharted constitutional and criminal territory,” added the source, who has given legal advice to Trump. “The government is using statutes that have never been used by an existing administration against a political opponent.”

Likewise, Trump’s lawyers in the Mar-a-Lago case have argued Trump complied with the Presidential Records Act — even though that statute is not discussed in the charging documents.

“The intersection between the Presidential Records Act and the various criminal statutes at issue has never been addressed by any court, and in the Defendants’ view, will result in a dismissal of the indictment,” Trump’s lawyers argued in their July 10 filing in the documents case.

‘A productive meeting’

Trump’s legal team has had many months, if not years, to plot out his legal defense ahead of his anticipated indictment on 2020 election-related charges. They met last Thursday with Smith’s office in Washington, D.C., to discuss the case.

“My attorneys had a productive meeting with the DOJ this morning, explaining in detail that I did nothing wrong, was advised by many lawyers, and that an Indictment of me would only further destroy our Country,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. 

But as the political world braced last week for the grand jury at the federal courthouse in Washington to hand down an indictment related to the 2020 election probe, the fast-moving federal legal challenges encircling the former president took an unexpected turn. That’s when the grand jury in South Florida added new felony charges and a new co-defendant to the Mar-a-Lago documents case.

“This is prosecutorial misconduct used at a level never seen before," Trump said in a Fox News interview shortly after the new charges were filed. "If I weren’t leading [President Joe] Biden by a lot in numerous polls, and wasn’t going to be the Republican nominee, it wouldn’t be happening. It wouldn’t be happening."

Early polls on a hypothetical Trump-Biden presidential general election rematch in 2024 show mixed results. Even if he is convicted and sentenced on federal charges, he said in a radio interview last week, he would not stop his presidential campaign.

As he fends off nearly a dozen major contenders for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and with debates scheduled to begin late next month and the Republican National Convention scheduled for July 2024, Trump will be facing a legal battle on many fronts.

The trial in the Mar-a-Lago documents case is scheduled to begin in May 2024, and it could last anywhere from three to seven weeks, according to differing estimates from the prosecutors and defense attorneys, respectively. An indictment decision stemming from a Fulton County, Georgia, probe into 2020 election interference is expected in the coming weeks.

And Trump is also scheduled to go on trial in March 2024 on New York state felony charges concerning alleged "hush money" payments made during the 2016 presidential campaign. After failing in an initial bid to move the case from state court to federal court, Trump’s lawyers on Friday filed an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Trump has long been known to churn through lawyers, from his previous life as a businessman to his presidential term, and now as he spends significant chunks of his 2024 campaign budget on helping keep him out of prison. 

But he's also long been known to skirt his own lawyers' advice, as evidenced by his penchant to say whatever he wants, legal consequences be damned. He also appears to have made a recent request to DOJ that he be allowed to discuss classified documents with his lawyers at the very same private clubs in Florida and New Jersey where he's now been charged with breaking the law. 

“Donald Trump listens to everyone’s counsel and then takes his own,” longtime Trump friend and advisor Michael Caputo told The Messenger earlier this year. “And public relations weighs more heavily in Donald Trump’s mind than in a lawyer’s mind.”

Marc Caputo contributed to this report.