After revelations last week that special counsel Jack Smith’s team had mishandled evidence in the trial of former President Donald Trump over his allegedly criminal mismanagement of classified documents, Trump went on social media to demand that the case against him be dropped — and that Smith himself be prosecuted instead.
“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 Friday evening on Truth Social. “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,” he added. “END THE ‘BOXES HOAXES.’ MAGA2024!” (emphasis original throughout).
Hours later, Trump returned to his Truth Social account to demand that Smith be arrested.
“ARREST DERANGED JACK SMITH,” Trump wrote in the second post. “HE IS A CRIMINAL!”
Smith revealed in a Friday court filing that at some point after boxes of documents were seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, the order in which the documents were stored was changed.
The filing concerned a claim from defendant Walt Nauta that he needs more time to know which documents seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate were in which boxes and the order of the documents in the boxes.
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The filing admitted the order of documents as stored currently does not match scans that were made earlier.
“Since the boxes were seized and stored, appropriate personnel have had access to the boxes for several reasons, including to comply with orders issued by this Court in the civil proceedings noted above, for investigative purposes, and to facilitate the defendants’ review of the boxes,” the prosecution team wrote. “There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.”
Then Smith’s team admitted — in a footnote — that it had previously mislead the court about whether the documents remained “in their original, intact form as seized.”
“The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” the filing stated.
“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,” the government said. “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 the detail may be more significant that it seems, because Trump’s defense is expected include the argument that documents were packed in chronological order, with no regard for classification marking, according to Just the News.
“Prosecutors and investigators should never tamper with or alter evidence in their possession, including the order of documents in a box, because one never knows what may become relevant or crucial to a court or jury later in a case,” Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz told the outlet.
Attorney Tim Parlatore, who was formerly on Trump’s defense team, said “this admission is stunning on multiple levels.”
The new information “reinforces the incompetence” of the DOJ team “in conducting basic criminal investigations and prosecutions that I observed when I was on the team. But at a deeper level, the loss of specific document locations is a destruction of exculpatory evidence,” he said.
“I went through all of the boxes at NARA and the document order was important because it was clear to us that the boxes had been untouched since leaving the White House,” he added. “For prosecutors who are trying to prove that the defendants knowingly possessed these documents to then destroy the evidence that would undermine that claim is a very serious violation.”
Smith’s team had previously told the court that all of the documents were in their original order, “with one exception; and that is that the classified documents have been removed and placeholders have been put in the documents,” according to Friday’s filing.
