Former President Donald Trump argued that special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents case against him should be tossed after prosecutors wrote that they misled a judge about the order of items in an evidence box.
They added that there are “some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.”
His team also acknowledged in a footnote that federal prosecutors effectively misled the court after telling the judge that the evidence was exactly the same when it was seized. “The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” the footnote said.
Mr. Smith’s team provided multiple “possible explanations” as to why the documents were rearranged after seizing the boxes from Mar-a-Lago, according to the filing.
“There are several possible explanations, including the above-described instances in which the boxes were accessed, as well as the size and shape of certain items in the boxes possibly leading to movement of items,” they wrote. “For example, the boxes contain items smaller than standard paper such as index cards, books, and stationary, which shift easily when the boxes are carried, especially because many of the boxes are not full.”
But President Trump wrote that Mr. Smith’s filing is effectively an admission of what he has “been saying happened since the Illegal RAID on my home, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach ... that he and his team committed blatant Evidence Tampering by mishandling the very Boxes they used as a pretext to bring this Fake Case.”
He then called for the case to be immediately dropped.
President Trump has pleaded not guilty to 40 charges connected to allegations that he illegally retained classified documents at his home after leaving in January 2021 and obstructed officials’ attempts to retrieve them. Two of his aides, Walt Nauta and Carlos de Oliveira, have also been charged in the case.
Legal group Judicial Watch also suggested that Mr. Smith’s classified documents case against President Trump should be tossed after the admission.
He said that the filing also included an FBI “admission” that the agency was “completely screwing with the classified documents.”
His comment pointed to a statement from the FBI that said that its agents had “created an index to correlate the documents with classification markings to codes,” labeled the cover sheets in the boxes, and “generally replaced the handwritten sheets with classified cover sheets annotated with the index code” after the boxes were brought to the Washington field office after they were taken from Mar-a-Lago, according to the court filing.
“In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet,” it added.
Last week, President Trump’s lawyers wrote to Judge Cannon that the case should be dismissed, arguing that Mr. Smith and his team have an “improper political animus” against him. He said that White House lawyers worked with the National Archives and Records Administration when it referred the allegations to the Department of Justice and that it is an attempt to ensure that President Trump doesn’t get reelected.
