Trump ally Tom Barrack in court on UAE lobbying case

A lawyer for Tom Barrack — the private equity investor who is a close friend of former President Donald Trump — on Thursday pushed federal prosecutors to quickly turn over evidence in their criminal allegation that Barrack illegally lobbied the Trump administration for the United Arab Emirates.

Barrack’s defense attorney Matthew Herrington questioned why he has not yet been given all or most of that material, given the fact that federal authorities have assembled evidence related to Barrack, 74, for the past four years.

Herrington raised the issue during the first status conference in the case in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, where Barrack and his business associate Matthew Grimes have pleaded not guilty to an indictment accusing them of secretly working to advance the interests of UAE with Trump’s 2016 campaign and then during his presidency.

Barrack is free on a $250 million bond, while Grimes is free on a $5 million bond. A third defendant, 43-year-old UAE national Rashid Sultan Rashid Al Malik Alshahhi, remains at large

Barrack’s lawyer noted that the documents turned over by prosecutors in the past month do not even include material cited in the indictment against Barrack and the 27-year-old Grimes.

Herrington told Judge Brian Cogan that as a result, he is “suffering from really profound information asymmetry.”

Prosecutors are required in criminal cases to share with defense lawyers evidence that forms the basis of their claims that a defendant broke the law.

And they are specifically required to share any information they have that could be used to show that a defendant did not break the law as alleged.

Such potentially exculpatory evidence is known as “Brady material,” after the court case which established defendants’ rights to that information.

Herrington during Thursday’s hearing told Cogan that prosecutors “take the position that there is not Brady material that they’ve identified at this point, which is surprising to me.”

Herrington said that there are claims in the indictment that cite evidence that he considers to be Brady material.

Assistant U.S. attorney Ryan Harris told the judge that since July 20, when Barrack and Grimes were arrested, prosecutors have turned over more than 100,000 pages of documents to defense lawyers, and will continue turning over more evidence “on a rolling basis.”

“We’ve made 10 productions [of set of documents] in about 30 days,” Harris said.

The prosecutor said the government does not consider any evidence used in the indictment to be Brady material, despite the claims by Barrack’s lawyer to the contrary.

Asked by Cogan what percentage of the total amount of evidence the 100,000 pages represented, Harris said,…