Former President Donald Trump asked a federal judge to dismiss the felony indictment accusing him of mishandling classified documents, saying the special counsel “destroyed” critical evidence in the case by shuffling the order of papers collected from Mr. Trump’s home.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers say he didn’t know he was intentionally taking classified material, and they say the order of the documents could have bolstered that argument.
Now that defense has been damaged.
“The government was more interested in staging — and leaking — manipulated photographs to the press than preserving key exculpatory evidence that has now been lost forever,” Christopher Kise, Mr. Trump’s attorney, said in asking the judge to dismiss the indictment.
Special counsel Jack Smith, the man the Justice Department picked to pursue Mr. Trump, has admitted to upending the order of the documents in the boxes collected from Mar-a-Lago. He has characterized it as a processing mistake.
But Mr. Trump’s attorneys said in a filing dated Monday that the disruption hurts their ability to mount a critical defense that Mr. Trump didn’t knowingly take classified documents.
They said that if they’d been able to show the documents were tucked in alongside the former president’s personal correspondence it would bolster their argument that Mr. Trump “lacked knowledge and culpable criminal intent.”
Compounding matters, Mr. Kise said the special counsel only admitted the bungle after prodding from lawyers for Mr. Trump’s co-defendants. Mr. Kise said that suggested a “callous attitude toward Mr. Trump’s rights.”
FBI investigators seized 45 boxes of documents in their initial raid at Mar-a-Lago.
Mr. Trump’s legal team and Mr. Smith have been sparring over how the documents became disordered and how serious a matter that is.
Congressional Republicans raised the issue with Attorney General Merrick Garland in a hearing last week.
“Prosecutors aren’t supposed to tamper with evidence, and it looks like that’s what he did. He changed the sequence of the documents that he seized from Mar-a-Lago,” said Rep. Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican.
“That’s a false characterization,” Mr. Garland shot back, disputing Mr. Jordan’s use of the word “tamper.”
He declined to comment further, citing the ongoing legal wrangling.
The Trump campaign cited the “shocking failure” in a blistering attack Tuesday as it announced the previous day’s filing of the court motion.
“Deranged Jack Smith was forced to admit in a public filing that he and his Thugs committed blatant Evidence Tampering by mishandling the very documents they used as pretext to bring this Fake Case,” said Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign.
The documents case is pending before U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon.
Mr. Trump also faces another federal case in Washington accusing him of attempting to undermine the 2020 election. He faces state charges in Georgia stemming from the 2020 election. And he was found guilty late last month in a New York court on charges of illegally concealing hush money paid to an adult film actress.
Judge Cannon earlier this week rejected another Trump motion to dismiss the indictment over “deficiencies” in the way it was written.
She said it was premature and said any actual deficiencies could be corrected by giving the jury proper instructions.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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