Former President Donald Trump is asking for Special Counsel Jack Smith to be held responsible after he admitted that seized documents in Trump’s classified documents case have been jumbled and are not in their original sequence and order.
BREAKING: Donald Trump Calls For Jack Smith's Arrest!
After a bombshell revelation in the 'Classified Documents' case where Special Counsel Jack Smith's team admitted that some of the evidence in the case is not in its "original, intact" form and that there are some boxes where… pic.twitter.com/WGBUEU0RGf
— Conservative Brief (@ConservBrief) May 4, 2024
In a post to Truth Social on Friday, Trump called for Smith’s arrest, saying, “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!” he continued.
In a follow-up post, Trump wrote, “ARREST DERANGED JACK SMITH. HE IS A CRIMINAL!”
In a court-filing on Friday, prosecutors in the case admitted that “there are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.”
This raised eyebrows as they had told the court in the past that the documents were “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,” prosecutors wrote in a footnote.
The issue at hand is in relation to the 33 boxes of documents seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida in August 2022. The prosecutors’ filing last week comes after a request for delay from one of Trump’s co-defendants, who said that lawyers were having trouble finding the origin of some documents in the evidence boxes.
Smith’s team revealed in the Friday filing that classified documents discovered in Trump’s residence were replaced with printed “classified cover sheets,” which FBI agents carried during the search of the home.
“The investigative team used classified cover sheets for that purpose, until the FBI ran out because there were so many classified documents, at which point the team began using blank sheets with handwritten notes indicating the classification level of the document(s) seized,” the prosecutors wrote, adding, “Any handwritten sheets that currently remain in the boxes do not represent additional classified documents — they were just not removed when the classified cover sheets with the index code were added. In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet.”
Smith charged Trump with 40 felony counts in the case, including conspiracy to obstruct justice and violation of the Espionage Act. Trump, who has consistently maintained innocence in the case, has accused Smith of working with the Biden administration to promote an “Election Interference Scam.”
