Special Counsel Jack Smith admitted via court filings on Friday that certain pieces of evidence in former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case may have been mishandled or reshuffled by the FBI following the raid on Mar-a-Lago.
In a series of documents submitted to US District Judge Aileen Cannon last week, Smith acknowledged that “there are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.” This contradicted previous statements from the prosecution insisting that all 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,” a footnote continues.
The filings were submitted in connection with Trump co-defendant Waltine Nauta’s request for a delay in court proceedings after his lawyers had difficulties determining the origins of certain documents in the evidence boxes.
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According to defense attorneys for Nauta and Trump, these discrepancies in file organization amount to evidence tampering. Trump’s legal team says that the documents were stored chronologically when Trump received them in the White House, and they are planning to argue that staffers packed up the boxes and shipped them to Mar-a-Lago without them or the former president realizing that the boxes contained classified information.
Prosecutors, however, have downplayed the mix-up and claim it has no bearing on the criminal charges.
Related: National Archives and Biden DOJ Colluded to Launch Trump Classified Docs Case
At the time of the Mar-a-Lago raid in August 2022, the FBI seized 33 boxes of documents from among Trump’s personal records, resulting in 40 felony counts against the former president. Trump pled not guilty to all charges and has repeatedly slammed the investigation as an “Election Interference Scam” concocted by “Deranged Jack Smith” and the Biden administration.
“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,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday. “END THE ‘BOXES HOAXES.’”
“ARREST DERANGED JACK SMITH. HE IS A CRIMINAL!” Trump added in a follow-up post.
Connor Walcott is a staff writer for Valuetainment.com. Follow Connor on X and look for him on VT’s “The Unusual Suspects.”
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