Classified Information and State Secrets

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      Canadian Is Sentenced to 14 Years for Passing Along State Secrets

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      Cameron Ortis was convicted of passing state secrets to men under police investigation, but his motives remain unknown. He said it was all part of an international mission he could not disclose.A former civilian director of an elite intelligence unit in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was sentenced to 14 years in prison on Wednesday after his conviction last year of giving confidential operational information to four men who were targets of police investigations.The sentence is half of what prosecutors had sought for the intelligence official, Cameron Ortis, whose motive, they acknowledged, remains unknown and who, they agreed, had been highly respected as the director general of the national intelligence coordination unit in Canada’s national police force.Mr. Ortis will get credit for the six and a half years he had spent in jail while awaiting trial and following his conviction in November.The case was the first time that charges under Canada’s 1985 Security of Information Act had been brought to trial. The act’s provisions meant that Mr. Ortis was “permanently bound to secrecy,” therefore his testimony was conducted in secret with only censored transcripts made public. Other evidence has been kept secret.Mr. Ortis repeatedly declared his innocence and testified that his actions had been part of a top-secret, international mission he had embarked on during a leave of absence in 2015 — to study French — and that the mission had been brought to him by someone at “a foreign agency.”He testified that binding promises he had made in taking on the operation prevented him from naming that person, identifying where he or she worked or telling the court what threat to Canada had prompted him to take on the task.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Special Counsel in Biden Documents Case Is Expected to Release Report Soon

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      Most of the work by Robert K. Hur appears to have wrapped up after President Biden sat down with investigators in October, according to people in Mr. Biden’s orbit.Robert K. Hur, the special counsel investigating President Biden’s mishandling of documents retained from his vice presidency, is expected to release his report soon, according to people with knowledge of the situation.The imminent release of the report suggests that Mr. Hur is nearing the end of an investigation that began just over a year ago.It is expected to criticize Mr. Biden and his aides for sloppy record-keeping and storage, according to people in Mr. Biden’s orbit, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter. But those people have long believed he will not be charged with any crime, judging from the lines of inquiry prosecutors have pursued in their interviews with witnesses and the president’s cooperation with investigators.Most of Mr. Hur’s work was completed in the final days of 2023, and appears to have wrapped up after Mr. Biden sat down with investigators in October, those people said. He also conducted interviews with several longtime advisers in the Biden administration, including the former chief of staff Ron Klain, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, and Steve Ricchetti, his counselor.Former President Donald J. Trump, who was charged over the summer with obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim classified materials at his resort in Florida, is likely to seize on the report to downplay his own legal woes — and to claim the Justice Department has targeted him politically while letting Mr. Biden escape punishment.But Mr. Hur’s investigation does not appear to be comparable in scope or seriousness to Mr. Trump’s retention of sensitive government documents.Mr. Biden’s lawyers immediately notified the National Archives and Records Administration upon discovering a cache of classified documents in late 2022 when they were closing an office in Washington he occupied after leaving the vice presidency in 2017. They have since cooperated with the Justice Department, and gave the F.B.I. access to his house in Wilmington, Del., where they discovered more material.Mr. Trump, by contrast, repeatedly resisted requests from the National Archives, which is responsible for storing sensitive White House documents, initially turned over only a portion of what he had taken when he left office in January 2021. He failed to fully respond to a subpoena to return the rest and ultimately was subjected to a search of his home and office by F.B.I. agents with a warrant.Last January, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland appointed Mr. Hur, a veteran prosecutor who worked in the Trump administration, to examine “the possible unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or other records discovered” after Mr. Biden left the Obama administration.With the exception of President Barack Obama, every occupant of the Oval Office since Watergate has confronted a special prosecutor scrutinizing him or members of his staff, sometimes for relatively narrow matters but at other times for issues that have mushroomed into the threat of impeachment. More

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      Prosecutors in Documents Case Reject Trump’s Claims of Bias

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      The office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, pushed back on the former president’s assertions that his prosecution was motivated by animosity toward him in intelligence agencies.Federal prosecutors pushed back on Friday against former President Donald J. Trump’s contention that his prosecution over the handling of classified documents was motivated by a longstanding bias against him among the intelligence agencies and other government officials.The pushback by the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, came in a 67-page court filing. The filing was intended to argue against Mr. Trump’s requests for additional discovery materials in the classified documents case.When Mr. Trump’s lawyers made those requests for materials last month, they signaled that they planned to place accusations that the intelligence community and other members of the so-called deep state were biased against Mr. Trump at the heart of their defense.But Mr. Smith’s team said that the former president’s requests for additional information were “based on speculative, unsupported, and false theories of political bias and animus.”Some of Mr. Trump’s demands for discovery were so ambiguous “that it is difficult to decipher what they seek,” the prosecutors wrote, while others, they added, “reflect pure conjecture detached from the facts surrounding this prosecution.”Discovery disputes can be contentious in criminal cases as defense lawyers push for as much information as they can get and prosecutors seek to limit access to materials that they believe are irrelevant.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Signals Plans to Go After Intelligence Community in Document Case

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      Court papers filed by his lawyers, formally a request for discovery evidence, sounded at times more like political talking points.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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Court Papers Offer Glimpse of Trump’s Defense in Classified Documents Case

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      The former president’s lawyers may question whether the documents he took from the White House were related to national defense and whether the country’s security was damaged.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump on Friday told the federal judge overseeing his prosecution on charges of mishandling classified documents that they intended to ask the government for new information, including assessments of any damage to national security.The lawyers also told the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, that they planned to ask prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, for additional information about how the documents at issue were related to national defense — a requirement of the Espionage Act, one of the statutes that Mr. Trump has been accused of violating. In addition, they said they wanted “tracking information” concerning the classified records.Mr. Trump’s legal team is poised to make the requests on Tuesday, when it files motions asking for additional discovery evidence. This is a standard part of the pretrial process in which the defense seeks to get as much information about the case out of the government as it can. Discovery motions often indicate how lawyers intend to attack charges before a trial begins or how they plan to defend against them once the case goes in front of a jury.The papers filed on Friday suggest Mr. Trump may be planning to attack the multiple Espionage Act counts he is facing by, among other things, questioning whether the documents he took from the White House were actually related to national defense. They also suggest he may seek to downplay how damaging their removal from the White House was to the country’s security.The papers themselves were not discovery motions, but rather a more simple request to use more pages than normal when the motions are due next week. But they did mention the broad categories of information that Mr. Trump’s legal team will seek.Mr. Smith’s team filed its own set of court papers on Friday, telling Judge Cannon that they intended to call several F.B.I. agents to testify at trial concerning data extracted from cellphones and other devices seized from Mr. Trump’s two co-defendants in the case. They are Walt Nauta, a personal aide who served the former president at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, and Carlos De Oliveira, Mar-a-Lago’s property manager.Some of the data, the papers said, will be used to track for the jury the movements of Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira during key moments of the investigation. Both men have been charged along with Mr. Trump in a conspiracy to obstruct the government’s repeated attempts to retrieve the classified materials.Mr. Smith also told Judge Cannon about some expert witnesses who will testify about classified material, but that section of the filing was submitted under seal.Until the two sets of papers were filed on Friday, the classified documents case has been relatively quiet in recent weeks and attention has been focused on the other case Mr. Smith has brought against Mr. Trump — one accusing him of plotting to overturn the 2020 election. Last week, Mr. Trump asked a federal appeals court in Washington to toss out the election interference charges, arguing that he was immune to them because they arose from actions he took while in office.The documents case has largely been bogged down in arguments involving a host of classified materials discovered or generated during the investigation that Mr. Smith’s prosecutors believe Mr. Trump should not have access to as part of the discovery process. Mr. Trump’s lawyers responded with a highly unusual request to see a motion that prosecutors filed under seal to Judge Cannon explaining their reasons for keeping that material from Mr. Trump.The case is headed toward an inflection point on March 1, when Judge Cannon has scheduled a hearing in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., to discuss when the trial will begin. It is currently set to start on May 20, but late last year Judge Cannon expressed concern that the proceeding might “collide” with the election interference trial, which is set to begin in early March in Washington but could well be delayed.Finding time for all four of Mr. Trump’s criminal trials — there are two more, in New York City and Atlanta — has been a logistical headache. The proceedings need to be scheduled not only in relation to each other, but also against the backdrop of an increasingly busy presidential campaign in which Mr. Trump is the current front-runner to become the Republican nominee.Mr. Trump has consistently sought to delay the trials, hoping he can postpone them until after the election is decided. If he can pull that off and win the race, he could seek to have the federal charges against him dropped and could try to complicate the efforts of local prosecutors to bring him to trial while he is in office. More

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      Material From Russia Investigation Went Missing as Trump Left Office

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      A binder given to the Trump White House contained details that intelligence agencies believe could reveal secret sources and methods.Material from a binder with highly classified information connected to the investigation into Russian efforts to meddle in the 2016 election disappeared in the final days of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, two people familiar with the matter said.The disappearance of the material, known as the “Crossfire Hurricane” binder for the name given to the investigation by the F.B.I., vexed national security officials and set off concerns that sensitive information could be inappropriately shared, one of the people said.The material’s disappearance was reported earlier Friday by CNN. The matter was so concerning to officials that the Senate Intelligence Committee was briefed about it last year, a U.S. official said.The binder consists of a hodgepodge of materials related to the origins and early stages of the Russia investigation that were collected by Trump administration officials. They included copies of botched F.B.I. applications for national-security surveillance warrants to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser as well as text messages between two F.B.I. officials involved in the inquiry, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, expressing animus toward Mr. Trump.The substance of the material — a redacted version of which has since been made public under the Freedom of Information Act and is posted on the website of the F.B.I. — is not considered particularly sensitive, the official said.But the raw version in the binder contained details that intelligence agencies believe could reveal secret sources and methods. (The publicly available version contains numerous portions that were whited out as classified.)It is not clear if the missing material comprises the entire original binder of material provided to the White House for Mr. Trump’s team to review and declassify in part before leaving office. Among other murky details, it is not known how many copies were made at the White House or how the government knows one set is missing.The binder has been a source of recurring attention since January 2021, just before Mr. Trump left office. At the time, Mr. Trump’s aides prepared redactions to some of the material it contained because the president — who was obsessed with the Russia investigation and believed his political enemies had used it to damage his presidency — planned to declassify it and make it public.Officials made several copies of the version with the redactions, which some Trump aides planned to release publicly.Mr. Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, had a copy of material from the binder given to at least one conservative writer, according to testimony and court filings.But when Justice Department officials expressed concerns that sharing some of the material would breach the Privacy Act at a time when the department was already being sued by Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page for having publicly released some of their texts, the copies were hastily retrieved, according to two people familiar with the matter.Mr. Trump was deeply focused on what was in the binder, a person close to him said. Even after leaving the White House, Mr. Trump still wanted to push information from the binder into the public eye. He suggested, during an April 2021 interview for a book about the Trump presidency, that Mr. Meadows still had the material.“I would let you look at them if you wanted,” Mr. Trump said in the interview. “It’s a treasure trove.”Mr. Trump did not address a question about whether he himself had some of the material. But when a Trump aide present for the interview asked him, “Does Meadows have those?” Mr. Trump replied, “Meadows has them.”“We had pretty much won that battle,” Mr. Trump added, referring to questions about whether his 2016 campaign had worked with Russia. “There was no collusion. There was no nothing. And I think it was maybe past its prime. It would be sort of a cool book for you to look at.”George J. Terwilliger III, a lawyer for Mr. Meadows, said the former chief of staff was not responsible for any missing material. “Mark never took any copy of that binder home at any time,” he said.A person familiar with the matter said, shortly after the court-authorized search of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 by F.B.I. agents looking for classified documents, that they had not found any Crossfire Hurricane material.Adding to the confusion about the material and who was in possession of it, a set of the Russia investigation documents that Mr. Trump believed he had declassified did not have their classification markings changed when they were given to the National Archives, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.At the time, Mr. Trump was in a standoff with the archives over the reams of presidential material he had taken with him upon leaving the White House on Jan. 20, 2021, and was resisting giving back. So Mr. Trump told advisers he would give back those boxes in exchange for the Russia-related documents.Aides never pursued his suggestion.In the run-up to the 2020 election, John Ratcliffe, then Mr. Trump’s director of national intelligence, declassified around 1,000 pages of intelligence materials related to the Russia investigation, which Trump allies used to try to discredit the inquiry.In 2022, Mr. Trump made John Solomon, a conservative writer who had been briefly given the binder before it was retrieved, one of his representatives to the National Archives. This allowed Mr. Solomon to see Trump White House records deposited with the agency. He later filed a lawsuit against the government asking a court to order the Justice Department to send the binder to the archives so that he could have access to it.A court filing he submitted in August described the binder as about 10 inches thick and containing about 2,700 pages. The publicly released version includes fewer than 600 pages, many heavily redacted; it is not clear what accounts for the discrepancy.The filing said Mr. Solomon had been allowed to thumb through a version of the binder at the White House on Jan. 19, 2021. The contents, it said, included a 2017 F.B.I. report about its interview of Christopher Steele, the author of a dossier of unverified claims about Trump-Russia ties; “tasking orders” related to an F.B.I. confidential human source; “lightly-redacted” copies of botched surveillance warrant applications; and text messages between the F.B.I. officials.The filing said Mr. Solomon or an aide had gone back to the White House that evening and had been given a copy of the materials in the binder in a paper bag, and that separately a Justice Department envelope containing some of the documents had been delivered to his office.But as Mr. Solomon’s office was scanning the larger set, the filing said, the White House requested that the documents be returned so certain private details could be removed. Mr. Meadows promised Mr. Solomon he would get back the revised binder, it said, but he never did.When Mr. Solomon later tried to see the binder within the Trump White House records at the National Archives, he said, the agency denied him access to a box of 2,700 pages “with varying types of classification and declassification markings” that it said it was obligated to treat as highly classified. The agency also told him it did not have the declassified version of the binder that Mr. Solomon had briefly possessed, because the Justice Department still has it. More

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      Trump Asks Again to Delay Documents Trial Until After Election

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      The former president’s lawyers said his trial on charges of mishandling classified information should be delayed from its planned start in May because of problems gaining access to all the evidence.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump have again asked a federal judge to postpone until after the 2024 election his trial on charges of mishandling classified documents.In a court filing on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump’s legal team proposed moving the start of the trial to mid-November from May 20, the date set by Judge Aileen M. Cannon.It was not the first time Mr. Trump has sought to push back the trial, in which he stands accused of illegally holding onto dozens of classified documents after leaving office and conspiring with two aides to obstruct the government’s repeated effort to retrieve them. In July, his lawyers asked Judge Cannon to put off the trial indefinitely as they grappled with the complexities of the case.But after a flurry of court filings and a contentious hearing this summer in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., Judge Cannon decided that the case should go in front of a jury well before the presidential race ended.In their initial request to delay the trial, Mr. Trump’s lawyers claimed that he could not get a fair trial while he was running for office. But arguments like that were missing from his new proposal to push back the proceeding, which did not specifically mention the election. Still, the push to reschedule for mid-November 2024 was a de facto attempt to delay it until after the race was decided.Were that to happen, it would give Mr. Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican nomination, enormous sway over the case. If the trial were delayed and Mr. Trump were to win the election, he could simply order his attorney general to drop the charges. And even if he were convicted before becoming president, he could in theory seek to pardon himself.In their recent attempt to delay the documents case, Mr. Trump’s lawyers accused prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, of failing to meet their obligations to turn over evidence as part of the discovery process. The lawyers complained in particular that they lacked sufficient access to nine of the 32 classified documents that Mr. Trump has been charged with holding onto after he left office in violation of the Espionage Act.Those documents, prosecutors said last week, are so sensitive that they cannot be stored even in the highly secure facility in Miami that Mr. Trump and his legal team have been using. They said the materials would need to be reviewed under strict supervision in Washington.Mr. Trump’s lawyers also argued the delay was needed because the secure facility that was supposed to have been built for Judge Cannon to review classified materials in Fort Pierce was running at least three months behind schedule. Moreover, the lawyers claimed, Judge Cannon still lacked the necessary “electronic facilities” to write opinions and orders about the classified materials as well as “the physical space” to conduct hearings about it.The lawyers also cited Mr. Trump’s crowded courtroom calendar as another reason to delay the documents trial, claiming that neither they nor their client could “be in two places at once.”Mr. Trump is currently on trial in New York, facing civil charges of fraudulently inflating the value of several of his properties. One of his lawyers in that case, Christopher M. Kise, is also representing him in the documents case.His other federal trial, in which he stands accused of trying to overturn the 2020 election, is also on the horizon. The judge in that case, Tanya S. Chutkan, has scheduled the proceeding to start on March 4. But if it is delayed in any way, that trial could easily drag into the proposed start date for the documents trial.The appeal to Judge Cannon to delay the documents trial came a week after Mr. Trump’s legal team sought to delay the election case in Washington. They asked to push back until December their deadline — now set for next week — to file pretrial motions, saying they were still researching the “numerous novel and complex legal issues” in the case.Federal prosecutors in Mr. Smith’s office have reacted with frustration to Mr. Trump’s attempts to delay both of the proceedings.Last week, they filed court papers to Judge Cannon accusing Mr. Trump’s lawyers of seeking to “intentionally derail” the timing of the documents case. They made similar accusations on Monday to Judge Chutkan, who is overseeing the election interference case in Federal District Court in Washington. By asking for more time to file their motions, the prosecutors said, Mr. Trump’s lawyers were merely dragging their feet.The former president has acknowledged in private conversations with his aides that winning the election is likely to be his best bet for emerging unscathed from the four criminal cases he is confronting. Beyond the two federal cases, Mr. Trump has been charged in state indictments of falsifying business records in New York in connection with payments to a porn actress and of tampering with the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. More

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      Menendez Indictment Could Undercut G.O.P. Attacks on Justice Department

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      The indictment of the Democratic senator from New Jersey comes at a politically opportune moment for the besieged Justice Department.On Wednesday, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee repeatedly accused Attorney General Merrick B. Garland of singling out former President Donald J. Trump for selective prosecution, slamming him for what they call a “two-tiered system” of justice.Forty-eight hours later, the Justice Department indicted one of the most powerful Democrats in the Senate — Bob Menendez of New Jersey, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee — on bribery charges, making public a trove of evidence, including cash and gold bars stashed at his house.The department’s aggressive pursuit of Mr. Menendez appeared to undercut claims that Mr. Trump is the victim of pervasive political bias that targets leaders on the right while shielding transgressors on the left.The entanglement of electoral politics and law enforcement is becoming the norm, and the prosecution of a top Democrat up for re-election in 2024 has political as well as legal reverberations. And the indictment, brought by federal prosecutors in Manhattan with limited participation from the Justice Department’s national security division in Washington, comes at a politically opportune moment for the besieged department.“This case really should silence any critic who wrongly suggests that D.O.J. is politicized under Garland,” said Anthony D. Coley, a former spokesman for the department. “This D.O.J. follows the facts — and isn’t influenced by partisan politics, political affiliation or wealth — not anything but facts and law.”Barbara Comstock, a former Republican congresswoman from Virginia, said recent indictments showed the department was functioning as it should. “The department goes where the facts lead them,” she wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Trump, Hunter Biden, Menendez now. That’s how it’s supposed to work.”But the indictment could cut the other way, playing into the Republican argument, used so effectively by Mr. Trump during the 2016 campaign, that Washington is a swamp lorded over by corrupt Democrats. Republican reaction to the news was initially muted, but the Republican National Committee and House Republicans took to social media in an attempt to link Mr. Menendez to President Biden and the Hunter Biden scandal.Rules adopted by Senate Democrats require Mr. Menendez to immediately step aside as chairman of his committee, as he did when he was first indicted in 2015, reclaiming his post when the charges against him were dropped three years later.Mr. Menendez, one of the most powerful Democrats in the Senate, is the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. He is now required to step down from his leadership role.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesIf that buys Democrats some breathing space, it does little to weaken the longer-term political challenges, with President Biden and Senator Charles Schumer, the majority leader, likely to face increasing pressure to urge a defiant Mr. Menendez to voluntarily resign his seat.“Active matter, not going to comment,” said the White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, when asked whether the president wanted the senator to quit.Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey, who would have the power to appoint Mr. Menendez’s successor, called on Mr. Menendez to resign on Friday. His message was soon followed by like-minded calls from political leaders throughout the state.Earlier in the day, several other Democrats made similar statements. Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota compared the senator with Representative George Santos, the Long Island Republican indicted in May on 13 charges, including wire fraud. “It’s appalling,” Mr. Phillips told CNN.But Mr. Menendez showed no sign of backing down. Some top Democrats, including Mr. Schumer and Senator Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, who is likely to take over his gavel on the committee, released statements urging patience while the judicial process played out.Shortly after the charges were announced, Mr. Menendez issued a blistering one-page-long denial that was not unlike the vehement pushback by Mr. Trump and his supporters in response to his multiple criminal indictments.“For years, forces behind the scenes have repeatedly attempted to silence my voice and dig my political grave,” he wrote. “The excesses of these prosecutors is apparent.”Mr. Trump has not been accused of bribery or pay-to-play corruption. Yet Mr. Menendez’s indictment carries faint echoes of the investigation into the former president’s retention of classified documents at his Florida estate — most notably the inclusion of photographs from the senator’s house that were instantly disseminated on social media.But the charges against Mr. Menendez, whose opposition to the administration’s efforts to thaw relations with Cuba rankled many in the White House, are highly unlikely to influence the Republican strategy of undermining public confidence in the Justice Department under Mr. Garland and federal law enforcement more generally.During the contentious oversight hearing on Wednesday that foreshadowed the looming impeachment inquiry of President Biden, Republicans blasted Mr. Garland, time and again, for slow-walking the investigation into Hunter Biden, the president’s son, while fast-tracking two indictments against Mr. Trump.“There’s one investigation protecting President Biden — there’s another one attacking President Trump,” said Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “The Justice Department’s got both sides of the equation covered.”The hearing, which lasted more than five hours, focused primarily on the department’s five-year investigation of Hunter Biden, and a plea deal negotiated by David C. Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware overseeing the case, that would have spared Mr. Biden prison time on gun and tax charges. That agreement fell apart during a court hearing in July, and the government has indicted Mr. Biden on three felony weapons charges, while continuing its investigation into his lucrative consulting deals with foreign companies.The claim that Mr. Garland has weaponized the Justice Department for political purposes, while thus far unsupported by evidence, is a pillar of Republican messaging. Not only is it a way to rally the party’s base, but it is meant to counter a mountain of witness testimony and documentary evidence against Mr. Trump, who is accused of illegally retaining classified documents and trying to overturn the 2020 election.“Our job is not to take orders from the president, from Congress, or from anyone else, about who or what to criminally investigate,” the attorney general said. “I am not the president’s lawyer. I will also add that I am not Congress’s prosecutor. The Justice Department works for the American people.” More