Donald Trump demanded the arrest of special counsel Jack Smith after the attorney general's team said some evidence in the Mar-a-Lago secret documents case was no longer in its 'original and proper' form .
In an article on Truth Social, the former president called for the arrest of "Deranged Jack Smith. He's a criminal!" After federal prosecutors wrote in court papers that there were some boxes in which "the order of the items in that box is not the same," as shown by digital analyzes of the items after recovery by the FBI from Trump's Florida resort in August 2022.
Smith's office acknowledged that this was "contrary" to what the government previously told the court when it said the only changes were removing some classified documents and placing placeholders in the documents.
The court filings follow a request from Walt Nauta, one of Trump's co-defendants in the federal case and accused of helping the former president hide information from the FBI, asking the judge Eileen Cannon to postpone the trial until the trial date. His lawyers are struggling to determine the exact location where certain documents were recovered after an FBI search at Mar-a-Lago in August 2022.
In another Truth Social article, Trump accused Smith of "blatant tampering with evidence" and called for the case to be thrown out.
“It has always been clear that the documents affair is nothing more than an election interference scam concocted by crook Joe Biden, slanderer Jack Smith and their cronies of hackers and thugs,” wrote Trump.
"Now the deranged Jack has admitted in a filing before Judge Cannon what I have been saying since the illegal raid on my home, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida - that he and his team committed egregious evidence of tampering by mishandling the very boxes they used as an excuse to bring this false case." These largely illegal actions by politicized "oppressors" call for an immediate end to this witch hunt and an end to " the MAGA2024 box scam!
In court filings, federal prosecutors suggested "several possible examples" of why some of the documents in question were no longer in their original sequence as they were when FBI agents recovered them in Mar -a-Lago, including "the size and shape of some of the materials." objects in boxes", which can cause them to move.
"For example, the boxes contain smaller than standard paper items, such as index cards, books and stationery, which move easily when the boxes are carried, especially since most of them they are not full,” Smith’s team wrote.
The documents add that where the classified documents were stored in the Mar-a-Lago boxes does not “in any way” affect the criminal case and does not give Nauta a reason to delay proceedings.
“Nota acknowledges that he and/or his attorneys have access to the boxes in three forms: physical boxes, scanned documents, and labeled documents,” Smith’s team wrote.
“Naota’s claims regarding the accuracy of the non-confidential index recently provided to him pro bono to facilitate his review of the funds on March 12 are false.