'Secrets in cardboard boxes': Smith lambasts Trump over messy Mar-a-Lago docs storage
Special Counsel Jack Smith ridiculed former President Donald Trump's handling of classified information in a new court filing opposing an dismissal motion he calls "profoundly flawed," court records show.
Smith issued Monday a withering response to Trump's motion to dismiss his federal classified documents case on the grounds that prosecutors' admitted misclassification mistake constituted evidence tampering.
The prosecutor's rebuttal? Mar-a-Lago was a mess.
"Against this backdrop of the haphazard manner in which Trump chose to maintain his boxes, he now claims that the precise order of the items within the boxes when they left the White House was critical to his defense," Smith writes.
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"The FBI agents who conducted the search did so professionally, thoroughly, and carefully under challenging circumstances, particularly given the cluttered state of the boxes and the substantial volume of highly classified documents Trump had retained."
Smith pulls no punches as he describes Trump's transfer of official documents from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago social club where they were later found stacked in a ballroom, bathroom and shower, among other places.
"Trump personally chose to keep documents containing some of the nation’s most highly guarded secrets in cardboard boxes," Smith writes. "At the end of his presidency, he took his cluttered collection of keepsakes to Mar-a-Lago...After they landed in stacks in the storage room, several boxes fell and splayed their contents on the floor."
The prosecutor also notes the boxes were frequently moved around so Trump could "pick through them."
Smith does not mince words when it comes time for him to rebut Trump's claim that he cannot present a defense in federal Judge Aileen Cannon's Florida courtroom because FBI agents who searched his residence did not keep the papers in perfect order.
"Trump does not offer the Court a single case at any level, at any time, from anywhere in the country, in which the disruption of the precise order of documents gathered in the execution of a search warrant provided support for a spoliation claim," he writes.
"Despite this Trump asks this Court not only to be the first to find spoliation on such benign facts, but also to employ the most drastic sanction available—dismissal of the superseding indictment."
Smith also targets Trump's various claims that he's the victim of a political witch hunt, which the prosecutor characterizes as contradictory at best.
"Over many months, Trump has claimed, among other things, that he deliberately declassified the documents, that the FBI planted them, and that he intentionally selected and sent the documents to Mar-a-Lago as his 'personal records,'" Smith writes.
"The Court should see Trump’s newly invented explanations and his motion for what they are—his latest unfounded accusations against law enforcement professionals doing their jobs."