Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance has a solution for former President Donald Trump‘s legal team as it argues against a request by Special Counsel Jack Smith‘s team for a protective order around evidence in the case of United States v. Donald J. Trump.
Joyce’s no-frills solution is a “prompt trial,” which would, she suggests, push the evidence shared between the two sides during discovery into the public sphere quickly, satisfying what Trump’s team calls the American people’s “right to know what the evidence is.”
Joyce proposes her cheeky solution — she calls it a “killer of an idea” — as a simple way to avoid bickering over who can release what and which materials are “sensitive.”
Vance’s solution conflicts, of course, with the Trump team’s reported desire to delay the trial, a desire Trump’s lawyers have more overtly expressed in some of the other cases against him.
Smith’s team asked Judge Tanya Chutkan to issue a protective order around the evidence shared between the legal teams during pre-trial discovery, concerned that Trump may publicly expose evidence the prosecution shares with his lawyers — and spin it in an attempt to influence public opinion or otherwise tamper with witnesses and trial proceedings.
If Trump's lawyers think it's important to get the evidence in the DC case out to the people, as they say in their opposition to the proposed protective order, boy do I have a killer of an idea for them: let's go ahead & have a prompt trial. That way, everyone can know what the… pic.twitter.com/IL9LNGRf7p
— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) August 8, 2023
Trump’s team counters not by saying Smith is wrong to have concerns, but by saying instead that the evidence — “information that’s not sensitive” — should be shared with the public before the trial, if that’s what Trump wants to do with it.
Trump’s team writes “we will not agree to keeping information that’s not sensitive from the press” and justifies its desire to share discovery materials and evidence publicly (before the trial) with a signaling reference to the “campaign season” — significant because Trump has repeatedly characterized the DOJ’s actions as “election interference.”
“The press and the American people in a campaign season,” Trump’s side writes, “have a right to know what the evidence is in this case, provided that this evidence is not otherwise protected.”
Vance, whose solution answers that imperative, knows her idea won’t strike Trump’s team as a eureka moment. They hope to present the evidence to the public before the trial and couch it within the opposition narrative they hope to author, in effect disemboweling certain arguments before they are given proper context in court.
That’s, of course, not what discovery materials are shared for, but this is, of course, no ordinary case.
