The legal team representing former President Donald Trump has officially requested a meeting with Attorney General Merrick Garland, making the claim that he’s currently being treated unfairly. Trump’s lawyers sent a letter to Garland on Tuesday of this week.
“We represent Donald J. Trump, the 45′ President of the United States, in the investigation currently being conducted by the Special Counsel’s Office. Unlike President Biden, his son Hunter, and the Biden family, President Trump is being treated unfairly,” the letter reads, according to Fox News. “No President of the United States has ever, in the history of our country, been baselessly investigated in such an outrageous and unlawful fashion. We request a meeting at your earliest convenience to discuss the ongoing injustice that is being perpetrated by your Special Counsel and his prosecutors.”
A source close to the investigation revealed that the letter from the former president’s legal representation comes as Special Counsel Jack Smith has been putting in the hours to wrap up a probe launched into the discovery of classified documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida over the last few weeks.
As of this writing, it is not clear when Smith will announce the conclusions from his investigation or if there are plans to prosecute Trump.
Brooke Singman, a reporter for Fox News, reached out to the Justice Department for a comment on the letter, however they declined the request.
CBS News reports, “Although lawyers for a client under investigation can regularly ask to meet with Justice Department officials as charging decisions near, the outreach of Trump’s legal team to Garland himself is an unusual move, especially in an investigation spearheaded by an independent prosecutor. At the time of his appointment, the Attorney General said, ‘As special counsel, [Smith] will exercise independent prosecutorial judgment to decide whether charges should be brought.'”
CBS then explained that federal regulations say that there are only a few circumstances where an Attorney General is allowed to get involved with a special counsel probe, which is if the investigation somehow strays away from DOJ norms or breaks federal law. Just last week, Garland put out a report by Special Counsel John Durham who had been given the job of looking into the origins of the Russian collusion probe launched against Trump in 2016.
Durham himself wrote that Garland allowed him and his team to “operate independently.”
Anthony Coley, a former spokesman for the Attorney General, issued a response to the legal team’s letter saying there would not likely be a meeting.
“Jack Smith is running this investigation, not Garland,” Anthony Coley stated on a Twitter post. “Smith is not subject to the day to day oversight of any person at DOJ, including Garland… If Smith takes an investigative or prosecutorial step outside DOJ norms, Garland can step in at that point and overturn it. But then, Congress would be notified. And we’d all know about it.”
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