Special counsel refutes Trump's spoliation claim with box photos

FORT PIERCE, Fla. Special counsel Jack Smith revealed new photos in a court filing Monday evening that show how Donald Trump haphazardly stored classified documents at his Florida estate after the presidency, along with golf shirts stuffed in boxes alongside sensitive documents, newspaper clippings and the like. memories.

Images of a bag filled with national security secrets, memorabilia and miscellaneous items are part of prosecutors' efforts to show that the dozens of boxes containing government documents at Trump's residence and private club in Mar-a- Lago were so messy and disorganized that investigators could do so. does not maintain the precise order of the content they retrieved.

The Justice Department has previously released photos of the classified documents, but the new filing offers the largest number of such images. In one, a redacted document sits in a box on top of an edition of the Washington Post with a front-page story describing Trump's troubled relationship with the FBI. Next to this box are two crates of Diet Coke bottles.

Smith filed the photos in response to an argument by Trump that criminal charges against him should be dropped because investigators messed up the precise order of the boxes' contents.

Trump, the former president and presumptive Republican nominee in this year's election, faces 40 counts of willfully possessing classified information and obstructing government efforts to recover it, serious national security violations that would result in usually a prison sentence for a person found guilty of these violations.

His trial, originally scheduled for May, has been postponed indefinitely as U.S. District Court Judge Aileen M. Cannon hears a series of motions to dismiss and other requests from Trump's legal team, many of them outlandish, and deals with other pretrial matters.

In one such motion, filed June 10, Trump's lawyers wrote that by failing to preserve an exact copy of the content as it was found, investigators essentially destroyed evidence and thus made it difficult for Trump to employ certain defenses at trial.

Trump's lawyers suggested they might try to argue that the classified documents were buried at the bottom of the boxes with a hodgepodge of personal memorabilia, and that their client had simply lost the sensitive documents and didn't have the type of knowledge that would amount to criminal behavior.

Their argument, known as a spoliation of evidence motion, typically carries a high legal threshold. Defense attorneys would have to demonstrate that prosecutors intentionally destroyed evidence to persuade a judge to dismiss the case.

In his response to the motion, the special counsel said Trump's claims were baseless and contradicted by the evidence. The government filing includes transcripts in which people who worked for Trump told investigators that the former president knew exactly where the boxes were and what was in them, often ordering employees to bring a specific box to a specific location. certain occasion.

One employee told a prosecutor that they used the phrase A Beautiful Mind to describe the boxes, a reference to the Russell Crowe film about a mathematical genius, because Trump knew all about their contents.

Still, prosecutors said that if Trump wanted to present his defense that he didn't know what was in the boxes, any movement of the items recovered by investigators would not prevent him from doing so.

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 contained in the boxes when they left the White House was essential to his defense and, what's more, that the FBI agents executing the August 2022 search warrant should have known, Smith wrote in the filing. But since the overall contents of each box have not changed, Trump can argue both points and has everything he needs to do so. Nothing was lost, let alone destroyed, and there was no bad faith.

Judges generally rule on lengthy motions without holding a hearing. Cannon's tendency to hold hearings on many of Trump's requests has created a backlog in key decisions, delaying the original trial start date of late May and making it unlikely that Trump would be tried in Florida before the presidential election.

She has not scheduled a hearing on Trump's spoliation allegation, although she still could.

If Trump, who was convicted last month on separate charges in New York state, wins the presidency in November, he could appoint an attorney general who would seek to drop the federal charges against him. It is also against Justice Department policy to prosecute a sitting president.

Cannon held hearings on various motions in the Florida case Friday, Monday and Tuesday.

She made no court order, meaning written orders could be made at any time. On Tuesday, she expressed skepticism about Trump's claims that investigators misled a magistrate judge by seeking a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago.

A day earlier, she appeared to oppose placing new restrictions on Trump's bail after prosecutors asked her to stop him from making inflammatory and false accusations against the FBI. And on Friday, she took a deep dive into Attorney General Merrick Garland's appointment of Smith as special counsel, even as she acknowledged that legal precedent appears to support it.

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