Judge Aileen Cannon suspended a key deadline in former President Trump’s documents case after her lawyers suggested that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team “failed to preserve critical evidence” in the case, after prosecutors disclosed that some confidential records may not be in the original order in which they were found.
The suspension marks another delay in a process in which Cannon has not yet set a new trial date, casting further doubt on the chances of the case reaching a jury before the election.
It also derails an important discussion about which confidential documents Trump and his co-defendants want to use at trial — a battle now being waged by the former president even as prosecutors argue that “intra-case document sequencing” has no bearing on how defendants will build their case.
Cannon did not set a new deadline for the matter, and the decision on how confidential documents will be handled at trial could take months to resolve.
In a Saturday letter sent to the court Tuesday morning, Trump’s legal team attacks Smith’s team’s admission that the order in which the documents were found may have changed slightly.
“Your failure to disclose the spoliation of this evidence until this month is an extraordinary violation of your constitutional and ethical obligations,” wrote Trump lawyer Todd Blanche.
The letter sets out a series of demands for more information, including the instructions given to those who initially searched the boxes, all communications relating to the searches of the boxes and their movements, and a list of personnel who had access to them.
Smith’s team on Friday rejected arguments from Trump co-defendant and valet Walt Nauta asking to delay the deadline to lay out his plans to use classified information in his defense.
“The filtering team was careful to ensure that no documents were moved from one box to another, but they did not focus on maintaining the sequence of documents within each box,” prosecutors wrote.
“[Nauta] he had information about which confidential documents were located in which boxes for months and was unable to raise his current ‘issue’ about intra-box sequencing with the government until more than nine months after the boxes were made available to him,” prosecutors added.
But the filing included other details about the search of Trump’s home — including that authorities were unprepared for the enormous amount of classified information they found at Mar-a-Lago, running out of cover sheets they created to serve as placeholders. .
“If the investigation team found a document with classification markings, they removed the document, separated it, and replaced it with a placeholder sheet. The investigation team used classified cover sheets for this purpose, until the FBI ran out because there were too many classified documents, at which point the team began using blank sheets of paper with handwritten notes indicating the classification level of the document(s) ) seized, prosecutors. observed.
Any further push on the documents would have happened as a result of the special review required by Trump’s team, as well as the moving of small items like index cards and stationery, Smith’s team wrote.
Trump’s team, in its letter, responded to Smith’s efforts to dismiss the issue, saying it has repercussions beyond the confidential information that could be presented at trial.
“You cannot seriously argue that your recent grant of spoliation is irrelevant to President Trump’s pending motions before trial,” Blanche wrote.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
