Donald Trump has called for Special Counsel Jack Smith to be arrested after the prosecutor’s team said some evidence in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case are no longer in their “original, intact” form.
In a post on Truth Social, the former president demanded “ARREST DERANGED JACK SMITH. HE IS A CRIMINAL!” after federal prosecutors wrote in court filings that there are some boxes where the “order of items within that box is not the same” as they appear in digital scans of materials in the wake of the FBI retrieving them from Trump’s Florida resort in August 2022.
Smith’s office admitted that this is “inconsistent” with what the government previously told the court when they said that the only changes were some classified documents have been removed and placeholders put in the documents.
The court filings were in response to a request from Walt Nauta, one of Trump’s two co-defendants in the federal case who is accused of helping the former president hide the materials from the FBI, for Judge Aileen Cannon for a delay in the trial as his lawyers are struggling to determine precisely where certain documents were retrieved from following the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago in August 2022.
In another Truth Social post, Trump accused Smith of “blatant evidence tampering” and called for the case to be thrown out.
“It has always been clear that the ‘Documents Case’ is nothing but an Election Interference Scam concocted by Crooked Joe Biden, Deranged Jack Smith, and their Hacks and Thugs,” Trump wrote.
“Now, Deranged Jack has admitted in a filing in front of Judge Cannon to what I have been saying happened since the Illegal RAID on my home, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida—That he and his team committed blatant Evidence Tampering by mishandling the very Boxes they used as a pretext to bring this Fake Case. These deeply Illegal actions by the Politicized ‘Persecutors’ mandate that this whole Witch Hunt be DROPPED IMMEDIATELY. END THE ‘BOXES HOAXES.’ MAGA2024!”
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Smith’s office has been contacted for comment via email.
In their court filings, the federal prosecutors suggested “several possible examples” why some of the materials in questions may no longer be in their original sequence as when FBI agents retrieved them from Mar-a-Lago, including the “size and shape of certain items in the boxes” possibly leading to them moving around.
“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,” Smith’s team wrote.
The filings add that precisely where the classified materials were stored in the boxes at Mar-a-Lago does not affect the criminal case “in any way,” nor give Nauta a reason to delay proceedings.
“Nauta acknowledges that he and/or his counsel have access to the boxes in three formats: the physical boxes, the scans of the documents, and the documents with classification markings,” Smith’s team wrote.
“Nauta’s claims regarding the accuracy of the unclassified index recently provided to him as a courtesy to facilitate his March 12 review of the boxes are false.
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“The index did not purport to identify the location of documents within boxes. Rather, it indicated the room in which the document was found, including box number, if applicable. That information is entirely accurate.”
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 40 charges related to allegations he allegedly retained classified materials after he left office in January 2021, and then obstructed the federal attempt to retrieve them.
Nauta and Mar-a-Lago maintenance worker Carlos De Oliveira have also pleaded not guilty to obstruction charges after being accused of moving boxes of sensitive materials around Mar-a-Lago so they could not be found by the FBI, as well conspiring to delete security footage at the resort in Palm Beach.
The trial date in the classified documents case has yet to be finalized, but Cannon is expected to postpone it beyond its scheduled start date of May 20.
