18 U.S.C. § 4 (2024)

This is the official text of 18 U.S.C. § 4 (2024), part of Federal (US Code)’s United States Code — the codified general and permanent federal statutes of the United States, organized into more than 50 numbered titles by subject.

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Discovery of classified information by defendants

Official statutory text

The court, upon a sufficient showing, may authorize the United States to delete specified items of classified information from documents to be made available to the defendant through discovery under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, to substitute a summary of the information for such classified documents, or to substitute a statement admitting relevant facts that the classified information would tend to prove. The court may permit the United States to make a request for such authorization in the form of a written statement to be inspected by the court alone. If the court enters an order granting relief following such an ex parte showing, the entire text of the statement of the United States shall be sealed and preserved in the records of the court to be made available to the appellate court in the event of an appeal.

(Pub. L. 96–456, §4, Oct. 15, 1980, 94 Stat. 2025.)

Status: in_force · Read it on the official government site

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About this page: Statute text is reproduced from official government publishers via the Open US Law dataset (Vaquill AI, snapshot v2026.08, CC BY 4.0). Primary legislative text like this is public domain under the government-edicts doctrine (Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, 2020). We link every section back to its official source so you can verify it independently.