BATON ROUGE- A Louisiana private investigator accused of trying to illegally obtain Donald Trump's tax returns says he is a "white hat hacker" who tried to test and report a security flaw in a government website.

A defense attorney's court filing Thursday says 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.

Hamlett's lawyer also says his client tried to notify the IRS about that flaw last September - before the presidential election - but gave up when he couldn't reach anybody by phone.

Authorities have said Hamlett wasn't able to get Trump's tax returns.

Hamlett awaits trial in December on a charge he misused a Social Security number.