Special counsel Jack Smith on May 23 provided about 450 pages of materials to former President Donald Trump in the classified documents case, according to court records.
“The Government’s position [is] that such production exceeds its current discovery obligations,” Mr. Smith wrote.
It came after Mr. Smith’s team wrote in a filing that some documents and evidence were apparently rearranged before they were scanned and that it’s not clear how those materials were moved. The filing earlier this month sparked accusations from President Trump and his lawyers that the government may have tampered with evidence at the heart of the case.
For months, President Trump’s lawyers and prosecutors have been wrangling over how to deal with discovery information, which is subjected to rules under the Classified Information Procedures Act. They’ve also been arguing over materials that each side can access or even view.
A May 21 filing revealed that the former president’s lawyers discovered classified documents in his bedroom four months after the FBI searched his home, according to newly unsealed court documents.
An empty folder and “another mostly empty folder” with the markings “Classified Evening Summary” were discovered when attorneys searched his property after the FBI search in August 2022, the court documents said. The former president’s office provided a box that contained the four records to the FBI in January 2023, the documents said.
“Notably, no excuse is provided as to how the former president could miss the classified-marked documents found in his own bedroom at Mar-a-Lago,” Judge Howell, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, wrote in the order.
The former president pleaded not guilty after prosecutors alleged that he kept classified documents after leaving the White House in 2021. He has also said on multiple occasions that he declassified the documents while he was president.
That March 2023 opinion from Judge Howell directed a former lead lawyer for President Trump in the case to abide by a grand jury subpoena and turn over materials to investigators, rejecting defense arguments that their cooperation was prohibited by attorney-client privilege and concluding that prosecutors had made a “prima facie” showing that President Trump had committed a crime.
Her order was unsealed after Trump’s attorneys asserted in a motion that was also recently unsealed that evidence from the boxes of records that FBI agents seized during an August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago should be excluded from the case. They argued that the search was unconstitutional and illegal and that the FBI affidavit filed in justification of it was tainted by misrepresentations.
Mr. Smith’s team rejected each of those accusations and defended the investigative approach as “measured” and “graduated.” It said the search warrant was obtained after investigators collected surveillance video showing what it said was a concerted effort to conceal the boxes of classified documents inside the property.
“The warrant was supported by a detailed affidavit that established probable cause and did not omit any material information. And the warrant provided ample guidance to the FBI agents who conducted the search. Trump identifies no plausible basis to suppress the fruits of that search,” prosecutors wrote.
The defense motion was filed in February but was made public on May 21, along with hundreds of pages of documents from the investigation that were filed to the case docket in Florida, including the Howell opinion.
Also unsealed were new details about the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago that sparked claims that agents were armed and prepared to use deadly force at the time.
President Trump and other Republicans said on social media on May 21 that the Department of Justice (DOJ) “authorized the FBI to use deadly (lethal) force,” responding to newly unsealed court documents that revealed that FBI and DOJ agents were prepared for U.S. Secret Service resistance during the Mar-a-Lago raid.
But the FBI said that it was “standard protocol” for executing search warrants.
“The FBI followed standard protocol in this search as we do for all search warrants, which includes a standard policy statement limiting the use of deadly force,” an FBI spokesperson told The Epoch Times on May 21. “No one ordered additional steps to be taken and there was no departure from the norm in this matter.”
Earlier in May, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon indefinitely postponed the trial date. It’s not clear when the former president’s trial will start or if it will occur before the November election.
