Donald Trump demanded that the criminal case against him over classified documents be dropped and that special counsel Jack Smith be prosecuted instead, after Smith’s team admitted to mishandling evidence in the form of improperly altering the order of documents seized from Mar-a-Lago.
In a court filing, Smith acknowledged that the order of documents currently does not match earlier scans, and that various individuals had access to the boxes for investigative and other purposes, allowing for movement of items that could shift.
“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. “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!”
“ARREST DERANGED JACK SMITH,” Trump wrote. “HE IS A CRIMINAL!”
Smith had previously stated the documents were in their original, intact form, but admitted this representation was inconsistent.
Trump’s lawyers may argue the documents were packed chronologically with no regard for classification, so the alteration of order could undermine the prosecution’s claim that Trump knowingly possessed classified materials.
“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 stated. “There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.”
“The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” the filing stated.
Legal experts said prosecutors should never tamper with evidence, and the admission raises serious concerns about the investigation’s handling of potentially exculpatory information.
“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 said.
“This admission is stunning on multiple levels,” attorney Tim Parlatore said.
The 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.”
