OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Former President Donald Trump put pressure on President Joe Biden’s Justice Department to take action against special counsel Jack Smith following an explosive admission in a legal filing last week.
Prosecutors told U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over Trump’s classified documents case, that some evidence is no longer in its “original, intact” form, which led to his demand that the special counsel be arrested and charged.
“Arrest deranged Jack Smith. He is a criminal,” Trump wrote in all caps on Truth Social as one of several posts he made over the weekend after Smith’s prosecutors informed Cannon 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.
In another Truth Social post, Trump wrote: “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 in a Truth Social post. “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!”
Smith’s office admitted that this statement contradicts earlier information provided to the court. Initially, they had claimed that the only changes made were the removal of certain classified documents and the addition of placeholders in their place.
The filing was in response to defendant Walt Nauta’s request for more time to digest the contents and arrangement of the seized documents. It detailed which documents were in specific boxes and their correct order within those boxes. However, Smith’s filing highlighted a discrepancy: the current arrangement of the boxes does not align with earlier scans of them, a concern noted by legal experts.
“There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,” the filing said.
Smith’s prosecutors then admitted they had misled the court.
“The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” the filing added.
Several legal experts say this is a big problem for Smith and could get the entire case thrown out.
“It could [complicate the case]. I don’t know whether it will or not, but it certainly could,” John Malcolm, vice president for the Heritage Foundation’s Institute for Constitutional Government and former deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s Criminal Division, told The Daily Caller.
“The allegation or the argument would be, they’ve tampered with the evidence they’ve affected its integrity in some material way. I mean, it would be as if they had messed with somebody else’s DNA sample or had smudged the fingerprint,” Malcolm added.
“If prosecutors and law enforcement are cherry-picking documents, and slapping these labels on it that says top secret where that label was not already there, it can be very misleading to the viewer,” Philip A. Holloway, a criminal defense attorney and legal analyst, told the outlet. “And if that viewer is a court, then that’s misleading a court and that’s against the law.”
In the weeks after the raid, an FBI photo of the crime scene at Mar-a-Lago went viral, revealing a mix of documents, some marked as “top secret.” Critics seized on the image to question how Trump could have unknowingly carried out documents with visible markings from the White House.
Investigative reporter Julie Kelly, who has been closely following the classified, further explained what Smith’s prosecutors attempted to do, in her view: “In other words, in their zeal to stage a phony photo using official classified cover sheets, FBI agents might have failed to accurately match the placeholder sheet with the appropriate document. This is a potentially case-blowing mistake, particularly if the document in question is one of the 34 records that represents the basis of espionage charges against Trump.”
