Former President Donald Trump railed against special counsel Jack Smith for “attacking” the judge overseeing his classified documents case out of Florida.
“Deranged ‘Special’ Counsel Jack Smith, who has a long record of failure as a prosecutor, including a unanimous decision against him in the U.S. Supreme Court, should be sanctioned or censured for the way he is attacking a highly respected Judge, Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over his FAKE Documents Hoax case in Florida,” Mr. Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social.
His post comes after Mr. Smith urged U.S. District Court Judge Cannon to reject Mr. Trump’s claim that he can’t be prosecuted for having the documents in his Mar-a-Lago home because they were his personal property under the Presidential Records Act.
Judge Cannon asked the legal teams of Mr. Smith and Mr. Trump to provide instructions to potential jurors on how to review the arguments.
Prosecutors said the claim made by the former president and Judge Cannon’s request “rest on an unstated and fundamentally flawed legal premise.”
“It would be pure fiction to suggest that highly classified documents created by members of the intelligence community and military and presented to the president of the United States during his term in office were ‘purely private,’” the prosecutors wrote.
Mr. Smith’s team urged the judge to “promptly decide” if Mr. Trump’s claim affects the case.
Prosecutors hoped the case could end before the Nov. 5 election, but that’s looking unlikely.
• Mallory Wilson can be reached at mwilson@washingtontimes.com.
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