Former President Donald Trump has intensified his demands for the Justice Department to take legal action against special counsel Jack Smith after a significant revelation in a recent legal filing. This disclosure came from Smith’s prosecutors, who admitted to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon that some evidence in the classified documents case is no longer in its “original, intact” state.
Trump expressed his outrage on Truth Social, calling for the arrest of Smith. “Arrest deranged Jack Smith. He is a criminal,” Trump wrote in all caps. His anger was fueled by the acknowledgment from Smith’s team that the order of items within some boxes does not match the digital scans made after the FBI retrieved them from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in August 2022.
Smith’s office admitted that this discrepancy contradicts earlier statements made to the court, where it was previously asserted that only classified documents had been removed and placeholders inserted. This admission came in response to defendant Walt Nauta’s request for more time to review the contents and organization of the seized documents. Smith’s prosecutors detailed how the current order of items within some boxes does not align with their initial scans, noting that various personnel had accessed the boxes for compliance with court orders, investigative purposes, and to facilitate the defendants’ review.
“There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,” the prosecutors wrote. They explained that this inconsistency could be due to several factors, including the physical handling of the boxes and the movement of smaller items within them.
This development has serious implications for the prosecution’s case against Trump, who is charged with possessing classified documents, a historic first for a former president or high-ranking elected official. Trump’s defense may argue that the documents were packed without regard to classification, undermining the prosecution’s claims.
Legal experts have noted that the misalignment of the evidence could pose a significant problem for prosecutors and potentially violate court rules regarding the preservation of evidence in its original state.
Trump has leveraged this revelation to bolster his claims of political persecution. In another Truth Social post, he labeled the case a “nothing but an Election Interference Scam concocted by Crooked Joe Biden, Deranged Jack Smith, and their Hacks and Thugs.” He further accused Smith and his team of “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!” Trump concluded.
