Following a recent filing in which special counsel Jack Smith’s team admitted that some of the evidence in their classified documents case against former President Donald Trump might have been arranged incorrectly after the documents were stored and replaced, for an infamous picture, with placeholders, former President Trump took to Truth Social to call for the arrest of Smith.
As background, prosecutors admitted to U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, who presides over the case, brought in federal court in Florida, that some of the evidence being used against Trump is no longer in its “original, intact,” form. The special counsel’s office also admitted that their admission about the form of the evidence contradicts their earlier claims that the only change to the evidence was that some of the documents had been removed and placeholders were put in their place.
The filing from Smith’s office came in response to a request from Walt Nauta, a defendant, for more time to digest both the content and arrangement of the documents the FBI seized. In the filing, however, it could be seen that the current arrangement of the evidence did not match the earlier scans of the evidence, a major concern for some legal analysts.
Responding to the news on Truth Social, former President Donald Trump sounded off on the special counsel and even demanded that he be arrested over the admission. In one post, for example, Trump wrote, “ARREST DERANGED JACK SMITH. HE IS A CRIMINAL! ”
That post included a link to a Just the News article on the matter, in which that outlet reported that Smith’s team admitted, in the filing with Judge Cannon, “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 filing continued, “There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.”
Further, the Just the News piece noted that, in a footnote, Smith’s office admitted that its current admission is different from what it previously told the court, which is that the evidence remained in the exact same state in which it was seized. “The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” the filing reportedly noted.
Alan Dershowitz, commenting on that admission, said, “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.”
Trump, commenting on the matter further in another post about Smith, 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. 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!”
Featured image credit: By United States Department of Justice – This file has been extracted from another file, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=132849708
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