Trump Signals Plans to Go After Intelligence Community in Document Case

Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump said in court papers filed on Tuesday night that they intended to place accusations that the intelligence community was biased against Mr. Trump at the heart of their defense against charges accusing him of illegally holding onto dozens of highly sensitive classified documents after he left office.

The lawyers also indicated that they were planning to defend Mr. Trump by seeking to prove that the investigation of the case was “politically motivated and biased.”

The court papers, filed in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., gave the clearest picture yet of the scorched earth legal strategy that Mr. Trump is apparently planning to use in fighting the classified documents indictment handed up over the summer.

While the 68-page filing was formally a request by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, to provide them with reams of additional information that they believe can help them fight the charges, it often read more like a list of political talking points than a brief of legal arguments.

Criminal defendants routinely make such requests in what are known as motions to compel discovery, but many of the requests in Mr. Trump’s filing appeared intended to paint Mr. Trump as the victim of the spy agencies that once served him and of purported collusion between the Biden administration and prosecutors who have filed some of the four criminal cases he now faces.

That portrait was in keeping with Mr. Trump’s persistent refrain that the so-called “deep state” has been out to get him nearly from the moment he entered public service. Such allegations have proved politically useful to Mr. Trump even if his evidence in support of them has often been