The disclosure that Special Counsel Jack Smith has met with the upper echelon of American intelligence in order to debunk President Trump’s claims of foreign election interference suggests hitherto unknown levels of contact between prosecutors and the national security state. 

Mr. Smith reports this conversations in a filing to Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing his criminal case against Mr. Trump for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. It comes in an opposition brief to Mr. Trump’s efforts to compel discovery materials from a wide range of executive agencies, under the theory that they have a hand in the special counsel’s prosecution.

At stake is the ambit of the Brady rule, a Supreme Court mandate that the government hand over to the defense any material in its possession that could be exculpatory. It is rooted in the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment. Courts have held that it covers records gathered by the “prosecution team” and entities that are “closely aligned with the prosecution.”

Mr. Trump argues that an entity falls under Brady if it possesses a “logical” relationship to the prosecution. He explains that the Department of Homeland Security and its quarter million employees, all three branches of the military, whose members number in the millions, and all 18 federal intelligence agencies clear this threshold. The 45th president also wants material gathered in Mr. Smith’s other criminal case against Mr. Trump, centered on classified documents stashed at Mar-a-Lago.

The special counsel’s position is that Mr. Trump’s requests are “boundless” and that the information the defendant “seeks is not in the Government’s possession, in many cases does not appear to exist, and in any event is not discoverable.” He objects with particular strenuousness to Mr. Trump’s request that materials from the more than 1,000 other criminal cases relating to January 6 be made available for his defense. 

The brief swerves into territory familiar to readers of  John le Carré  when Mr. Smith attempts to refute Mr. Trump’s argument that the specter of foreign interference in the last election justifies the disclosure of material from America’s intelligence community. If Mr. Trump sincerely believed that such interference took place, it would bolster his contention that contesting the result was justified. 

Mr. Trump points to Mr. Smith’s indictment, which alleges that the claim that “voting machines had changed votes for the Defendant to votes for Biden” was an instance of Mr. Trump “knowing lies regarding foreign interference.” The 45th president maintains that the Constitution grants him the right to requisition materials to rebut that allegation. 

Mr. Smith marshals an extensive battery of interviews his office conducted with intelligence officials. In them he asked if “they were aware of any evidence that a domestic or foreign actor flipped a single vote in a voting machine during the presidential election.” He reports that the “answer from every single official was no.” Mr. Trump maintains that Mr. Smith spoke only to a “selection of politically biased officials.” The special counsel calls that claim “theatrical.”

Mr. Smith lists the officials with whom he spoke, a roster that stretches across an entire paragraph. It comprises a director of national intelligence, cybersecurity principals, a presidential intelligence briefer, a former secretary of defense, and leadership within the Department of Justice. They all, according to Mr. Smith, rejected Mr. Trump’s  “lies about voting machines.” 

The special counsel maligns Mr. Trump’s request for “all information relating to foreign influence efforts” as “spin” and “incomprehensibly broad.” It is not known how much of the substance of those conversations with former officials Mr. Smith has disclosed to Mr. Trump via discovery. It could be that the 45th president will want to speak to them himself, via a subpoena at trial.

Mr. Smith calls Mr. Trump’s desire for this wide sweep of discovery a “sideshow,” but it is a position that the erstwhile president is likely to push on appeal should Judge Chutkan side with the special counsel. Mr. Trump contends that the case against him is ultimately rooted not in the special counsel’s office but in the White House and the agencies that  report to it.