Trump's attempt to 'graymail' Jack Smith into dropping charges will flop: expert

Donald Trump's attempts to use discovery to access sensitive government documents in the Washington D.C. trial for attempts to subvert the 2020 election results is nothing more than a ploy to get Jack Smith to drop charges against the former president, writes former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance.

In a posting to her Substack platform, Vance agreed with Smith's office that the ex-president's legal team is engaging in a fishing expedition in its requests for evidence complied by the government-related to outside interference in the election Trump lost by over 7 million votes.

According to Vance, Trump and his people are engaging in what is known as "graymail" in an effort to get the special counsel to back off — and that it will go nowhere with Smith.

"The defendant [Trump] demands an unprecedented expansion of the Government’s discovery obligations that would provide special treatment for him and result in delay," wrote Smith in a recent filing. "He asks this Court to find that a wide array of entities both inside and outside the Executive Branch are part of the Government’s prosecution team."

Vance went on to explain what Trump could be really trying to achieve with this filing.

"There’s a concept called graymail. That’s what happens when a defendant demands that the government handover classified material in discovery, in hopes that rather than expose important national secrets, prosecutors will dismiss some or all of the charges against them," she wrote before adding, "Smith works through all of Trump’s allegations regarding election fraud—everything from allegations of infrastructure compromise to allegations there were government agents at the Capitol on January 6—in a meticulous fashion, demonstrating that there is no evidence to be had because there was no fraud."

Predicting the judge would deny the former president's move, she added, "The bottom line is that his efforts to expand the universe of entities within the prosecution team is baseless and he fails to show that information he seeks would be material."

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