A new front in the criminal case against President Trump in Florida is opening with his bid to compel discovery from the Biden administration that could force the production of evidence from Special Counsel Jack Smith and a wide swath of the federal government, including President Biden.

That strategy surfaces even as receipts emerge from Georgia showing that a special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, billed the office of the district attorney of Fulton County, Fani Willis, to the tune of $4,000 for two meetings. One was a “conf with White House Counsel,” and the other was an “interview with DC/White House.”

Mr. Wade’s relationship with Ms. Willis is at the center of efforts to have the racketeering charges dismissed and the district attorney disqualified. Mr. Trump has not yet joined that effort, which so far is being pursued by another defendant, Michael Roman. The 45th president, though, does appear intent on widening the dramatis personae arrayed against him. 

Mr. Trump has long claimed that his prosecutions, emanating as they do from elected state district attorneys on the one hand and Mr. Biden’s Department of Justice on the other, are more akin to political prosecutions and amount to “witch hunts.” Now, though, those claims are being made in court and could provide Mr. Trump with behind-the-scenes access to Mr. Smith’s colleagues and superiors. 

As the Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins Jr. reports, Mr. Biden’s preference for prosecuting Mr. Trump has hardly been submerged. The New York Times reports that the president “said privately that he wanted” the attorney general, Merrick Garland, “to act less like a ponderous judge and more like a prosecutor who is willing to take decisive action.” That call, it appears, was also heeded by state prosecutors like Ms. Willis and Manhattan’s district attorney, Alvin Bragg.

Now, in South Florida, in the motion of the moment, Mr. Trump alleges that the strings of the cases against him are being pulled from the Oval Office and denounces the “Biden Administration’s egregious efforts to weaponize the criminal justice system in pursuit of an objective that President Biden cannot achieve on the campaign trail: Slowing down President Trump’s leading campaign.” 

Mr. Trump alleges that there is “exculpatory, discoverable evidence in the hands of the senior officials at the White House, DOJ, and FBI who provided guidance and assistance as this lawless mission proceeded.” The existence of evidence of this nature would trigger the government’s constitutional obligation, under Brady v. Maryland, to proactively disclose potential evidence to the defendant, regardless of whether it is demanded. 

If Judge Aileen Cannon, who is sitting over the federal case in Florida, or an appellate judge is persuaded that the “prosecution” team stretches beyond the office of the special counsel and comprises swaths of the federal government — spooks and bureaucrats, wonks and advisers, lackeys and lawyers — then the range of what is discoverable would broaden considerably. So, too, would the penalty for not complying with Brady, which is usually dismissal with prejudice, meaning the case cannot be brought again. 

A clue to how far Mr. Trump argues the prosecution team’s tentacles extend can be discerned in his contention that “even the Department of Energy has taken up the Biden Administration’s mantle by seeking in June 2023 to terminate President Trump’s active security clearance,” making that agency, in his view, a party to the case as well. He calls that a “highly inconvenient fact.”

Mr. Trump’s characterization of the prosecution as “politically motivated and biased” means, he argues, that the alleged secrecy of the more than 30 documents found at Mar-a-Lago that serve as the basis for the Espionage Act charges brought by Mr. Smith are “subjective assessments” infected by “analytic bias harbored by the intelligence community.”

Mr. Smith’s position is that the prosecution team is limited to his office and a handful of FBI agents who have assisted him, like those who conducted the search of Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Trump responds that the special counsel “​​cannot reap the benefits of these coordinated activities while ignoring exculpatory information and other discoverable evidence in the same offices.” 

The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit put it pithily, writing in 1999 that the government “cannot with its right hand say it has nothing while its left hand holds what is of value.” Mr. Trump accuses Mr. Smith of this sleight of hand by misreporting the size of his camarilla. On this head, Justice William Brennan Jr., in 1988, declared: “Criminal discovery is not a game.”

Mr. Trump’s demand for “documents and communications reflecting bias and/or political animus toward President Trump” on the part of Mr. Smith’s team could persuade Judge Cannon to demand a full accounting of Mr. Wade’s time at the White House, as well as any correspondence between 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the special counsel.