Former President Donald Trump is calling for the arrest of Special Counsel Jack Smith over admitted discrepancies in the order of classified documents in evidence and a reported threat to co-defendant Walt Nauta's lawyer.
"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," Trump posted to Truth Social on Friday. "These deeply Illegal actions by the Politicized ‘Persecutors’ mandate that this whole Witch Hunt be DROPPED IMMEDIATELY. END THE ‘BOXES HOAXES.’ MAGA2024!"
A followup post added, "ARREST DERANGED JACK SMITH. HE IS A CRIMINAL!"
After telling the court previously that the boxes and documents were "in their original, intact form as seized," prosecutors admitted Friday that "there are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans."
"The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court," a footnote in the filing reads.
The filing was a response to a filing by one of Trump's co-defendants asking for a delay due to lawyers having trouble locating some of the documents.
Trump is charged with 40 criminal counts in the case, including violating the Espionage Act, making false statements to investigators, and conspiracy to obstruct justice.
He has called the charges a "scam" and "election interference."
The trial is scheduled to start on May 20, but could be delayed because of the document discrepancies or due to Judge Aileen Cannon unredacting a large number of documents in the leadup to the case.
The unredacted documents show efforts to get the Trump documents back before Mar-A-Lago was raided in 2022 and suggest that Nauta's counsel Stanley Woodward might have been threatened to get Trump to flip or risk losing a judge appointment.
A June 2023 filing stated that Woodward met with prosecutor Jay Bratt, who told him he was being considered for an appointment to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.
"I wouldn’t want you to do anything to mess that up," Bratt allegedly told Woodward. He then encouraged Woodward to get Nauta to flip on Trump.
Trump attorney James Trusty said the meeting amounted to "extortion." Nauta subsequently switched lawyers and is now expected to be a witness in the case against Trump, according to Politico.
