An attorney for the Louisiana private investigator accused of trying to illegally obtain Donald Trump’s tax returns says his client is a benevolent “white hat hacker” who tried to test and report a security flaw in a government website.
Jordan Hamlett tried to discover “out of sheer curiosity” whether Trump’s tax information could be accessed through a weakness in a U.S. Department of Education financial aid website’s data retrieval tool, his attorney says in a court filing.
Hamlett’s lawyer, Michael Fiser, adds his client tried to call the IRS about the flaw last September—before the presidential election—on the same day he tried to access Trump’s tax records.
“Hamlett abandoned the attempt to notify the IRS when he could not reach a human, only recorded messages,” his attorney wrote.
Hamlett, 32, wasn’t able to get the tax returns. He awaits trial in December on a charge he misused a Social Security number.
Federal prosecutors haven’t offered any possible motives for Hamlett’s alleged attempt to get Trump’s tax records. But they’re asking a judge to bar Hamlett’s lawyer from presenting the “white hat” defense at trial.
“It is essentially nothing more than a belated excuse for a crime,” they wrote in a court filing last week. “As the law in this circuit makes clear, however, such after-the-fact excuses and self-justifications for crimes are irrelevant and immaterial.”
In a footnote, prosecutors explained that black hats are the “bad guys” who violate computer security for personal gain, while white hats are the “good guys” who employ the same methods but do so legally.
