MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell was flabbergasted by a detail in a new court filing from special counsel Jack Smith in the classified documents case against Donald Trump and two co-defendants.
According to the Friday filing, an attorney for Carlos De Oliveira, a co-defendant and maintenance supervisor at Mar-a-Lago, said he was unable to review CCTV footage the prosecution had obtained from the Trump Organization and provided during discovery because he did not own or have access to a laptop or desktop computer.
De Oliveira’s attorney said he had been attempting to review the entirety of the government’s discovery documents on a handheld tablet, the filing stated.
To resolve the issue, the government offered to loan the attorney a laptop, and “hand-delivered a computer to him,” according to the filing.
The prosecution said it has since offered assistance to the attorney, “providing tips and examples, and offering to set up calls,” whenever he has flagged technical issues.
“The unprofessionalism and incompetence of the Trump team of lawyers continues to amaze,” O’Donnell said Monday on “The Last Word,” describing the laptop anecdote as “a new jewel of Trump lawyer incompetence.”
“So Jack Smith’s team of FBI agents and prosecutors has to serve as the Genius Bar for at least one Trump lawyer who doesn’t even own a computer,” he said.
Andrew Weissmann, a former federal prosecutor, told O’Donnell it was “pretty poor form” and he hadn’t seen anything like it before.
Smith’s filing was in response to a motion to compel discovery from Trump’s attorneys, who argued that the prosecution had failed to share certain materials that they claimed would show political bias behind the investigation.
Prosecutors forcefully rejected those assertions, saying the defense sought “non-discoverable materials based on speculative, unsupported, and false theories of political bias and animus” and pointing out the prosecution had gone to great lengths to facilitate access to discovery — hence the laptop detail.
Trump is charged alongside De Oliveira and Walt Nauta, an aide, for his handling of classified documents taken to his Florida club after leaving office.
Watch O’Donnell’s commentary below.