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Former President Donald Trump pressured Joe Biden’s Justice Department to take legal action against special counsel Jack Smith after an explosive admission in a legal filing. Smith’s prosecutors informed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, overseeing a classified documents case, that some evidence is no longer in its “original, intact” form, which angered Trump.
Trump wrote in all caps on Truth Social, “Arrest deranged Jack Smith. He is a criminal,” in response to the news. This was one of several posts he made over the weekend after Smith’s prosecutors informed Cannon about discrepancies in the boxes of materials retrieved from Trump’s Florida resort by the FBI in August 2022.
Smith’s office acknowledged that this statement is “inconsistent” with what the government had previously informed the court. Initially, they had stated that the only alterations made were the removal of some classified documents and the insertion of placeholders in their stead.
The filing addressed defendant Walt Nauta’s request for additional time to learn the contents and organization of the documents seized. It specifically identified which documents were in which boxes and the correct sequence of the documents within those boxes. Smith’s filing noted that the current order of the boxes doesn’t match scans of them that were made earlier, which is a problem, according to legal experts.
“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 Justice Department prosecutors wrote.
“There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,” the document 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 document said.
“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 filing 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,” prosecutors wrote.
However, the details are a vital part of the prosecution’s case against Trump, the first former president or high-ranking elected official to be charged with possessing classified documents. Part of Trump’s defense is expected to be that documents were packed in chronological order, with no regard for classification marking, the Western Journal noted, citing legal experts.
“Legal experts told Just the News the revelation could prove to be a serious problem for prosecutors and a violation of court rules to preserve evidence in the state it was seized,” Just the News noted further.
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.
