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Special counsel Jack Smith has defended federal law enforcement’s handling of documents discovered at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property, sharing images in a new court filing that show how the former president stashed “top secret” materials and government “secrets” in a cluttered collection of clothing, Christmas ornaments, newspapers and photographs of himself.
The former president has argued that the charges in his classified documents case should be dropped on grounds that investigators failed to preserve evidence in the order in which they were found.
In photographs attached to a 33-page filing on Monday night, documents marked “secret” and “top secret” or bearing the White House emblem are seen stuffed in cardboard boxes alongside piles of golf shirts, sitting on top of old newspapers, and next to crates of Diet Coke.
One image shows a closet with newspapers and other documents spilling out on the floor from tipped-over boxes.
Smith’s team wrote that Trump “personally chose to keep documents containing some of the nation’s most highly guarded secrets in cardboard boxes along with a collection of other personally chosen keepsakes of various sizes and shapes from his presidency – newspapers, thank you notes, Christmas ornaments, magazines, clothing, and photographs of himself and others.”
After he left the White House in January 2021, Trump took his “cluttered collection of keepsakes” to his Florida home, “where the boxes traveled from one readily accessible location to another — a public ballroom, an office space, a bathroom, and a basement storage room,” according to prosecutors.
“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 within the boxes when they left the White House was critical to his defense, and, what’s more, that FBI agents executing the search warrant in August 2022 should have known that,” they added.
Smith has urged District Court Judge Aileen Cannon — a Trump appointee — to reject Trump’s “bad faith” argument that ignores the “unsurprising reality that the order of some of the items may have shifted since then.”
FBI agents who searched the property after Trump allegedly evaded the government’s attempts to collect missing documents “did so professionally, thoroughly, and carefully under challenging circumstances, particularly given the cluttered state of the boxes and the substantial volume of highly classified documents Trump had retained,” prosecutors added.
Trump had previously and spuriously argued that he declassified the documents, or that FBI agents had planted them, or that the boxes were packed up as his “personal records” after leaving the White House.
His latest “profoundly flawed” defense on “spoliation of evidence” grounds is “yet another attempt to his latest unfounded accusations against law enforcement professionals doing their jobs,” according to prosecutors.
Trump faces 40 separate charges stemming from allegations that he withheld hundreds of documents at his Florida property, then conspired to obstruct the government’s attempts to get them back.
He has pleaded not guilty.
In a series of courtroom hearings over three days, Judge Cannon heard Trump’s attorneys argue that Smith’s office was unconstitutionally created and funded.
The special counsel’s team also has asked the judge to impose a narrowly tailored gag order to prevent the former president from making statements that endanger FBI agents.
