Former President Donald Trump put pressure on Joe Biden’s Justice Department to take legal action against special counsel Jack Smith following an explosive admission in a legal filing.
Smith’s prosecutors informed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the classified documents case, that some evidence is no longer in its “original, intact” form, prompting outrage from Trump.
“Arrest deranged Jack Smith. He is a criminal,” Trump wrote in all caps on Truth Social as one of several posts he made over the weekend after Smith’s prosecutors informed Cannon that there are some boxes where the “order of items within that box is not the same” as they appear in digital scans of materials in the wake of the FBI retrieving them from Trump’s Florida resort in August 2022.
Smith’s office acknowledged that this statement is “inconsistent” with what the government had previously informed the court. Initially, they had stated that the only alterations made were the removal of some classified documents and the insertion of placeholders in their stead.
The filing addressed defendant Walt Nauta’s request for additional time to learn the contents and organization of the documents seized. It specifically identified which documents were in which boxes and the correct sequence of the documents within those boxes. Smith’s filing noted that the current order of the boxes doesn’t match scans of them that were made earlier, which is a problem, according to legal experts.
