(ReliableNews.org) – Special Counsel Jack Smith has two ongoing cases against former President Donald Trump. One of them deals with his alleged mishandling of classified documents and the other is related to the 2020 election. The presumptive Republican nominee recently called for the prosecutor’s arrest.
On May 3, Trump unleashed on Smith on Truth Social. The former president used all caps and said, “ARREST DERANGED JACK SMITH. HE IS A CRIMINAL!” Trump accused Smith’s team of “mishandling” the evidence in the case, claiming the “deeply illegal actions” by Smith meant the “whole Witch Hunt be DROPPED IMMEDIATELY. END THE BOXES HOAXES. MAGA2024!”
In a court filing the same day, Smith’s team acknowledged that some of the documents the FBI removed from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate when they executed a search warrant in August 2022 might not be in the same order they were found in. The prosecution was responding to a request for a delay from one of the former president’s co-defendants. The defendant’s legal team requested more time because they were having trouble figuring out exactly where some of the documents came from in the 33 boxes the government seized.
Smith’s team had previously stated the boxes were all “in their original, intact form as seized.” They incorrectly stated the only thing they’d done was replace the classified documents with placeholder sheets. Smith’s office admitted in the filing that some of the documents were inadvertently jumbled and placed in the wrong order than how they appear in the digital scans of the records from the fall of 2022. None of the files were removed (except the classified documents) and nothing was added to the boxes (except the placeholders for the classified docs), they were just put in a different order than they were when they were seized.
Prosecutors believe they were not placed in the right sequence after District Judge Aileen Cannon ordered all of the documents to be scanned and reviewed to determine if the FBI seized privileged records. That review was stopped by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which issued a scathing rebuke to Cannon. Smith’s team contends the sequence of the documents is of little importance.
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