Judge Eileen Cannon said Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team had “unprecedented the preservation of important evidence” in the case after prosecutors revealed that some classified records may not be in the order they were supposed to be. A key deadline in former President Donald Trump’s documents case has been put on hold after his lawyer suggested that he had failed. discovered.
The stay means further delays for prosecutors, who have yet to even set a new trial date for Cannon, casting further doubt on the possibility of the case going to a jury before the election.
It also undermines important debate over what classified documents President Trump and his co-defendants want to use at trial. Even though prosecutors claim that the “ordering of documents in the box” has no bearing on how the defendants produce the documents, their case is now being fought by a former president. .
Cannon has not set a new deadline for the matter, and it could be months before the courts decide how the classified documents will be handled.
Trump’s lawyers blasted Smith’s lawyers’ admission that the order in which the documents were discovered may have changed slightly in a Saturday letter published in court documents Tuesday morning. did.
“Your failure to disclose this theft of evidence until this month is an extraordinary violation of your constitutional and ethical obligations,” Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche wrote.
The letter sets out a series of requests for further information, including instructions given to those who initially searched the box, all communications regarding the search and removal of the box, and a list of personnel who had access to the box. .
Mr. Smith’s team on Friday rejected a request by Mr. Trump’s co-defendant and acolyte, Walt Nauta, to extend the deadline to submit a plan to use classified information in his defense.
“Although the filter team was careful to ensure that documents were not moved from box to box, there was no emphasis on maintaining the order of documents within each box,” prosecutors wrote.
“[Nauta] “He has had information about which classified documents are in which boxes for months, but the current ‘sequencing’ regarding the sequencing inside the boxes did not occur until more than nine months after the boxes were made available. “The issue” could not be raised with the government,” the prosecutor added.
But the filing also included other details about the search of Trump’s home. These included being unprepared for the vast amount of classified information that law enforcement found at Mar-a-Lago and lacking cover sheets to use as replacements. was.
“If the investigative team found a document with a classification mark, it deleted it, isolated it, and replaced it with a placeholder sheet. The investigative team used a confidential cover sheet for that purpose, but Once the FBI was running out of documents, the team began using blank sheets with handwritten notes indicating the level of secrecy of the documents they had seized.
Smith’s team wrote that other conflicts in documents may have occurred as a result of the special master review requested by Trump’s team or the movement of small items such as index cards and stationery.
In a letter, Mr. Trump’s team pushed back against Mr. Smith’s efforts to dismiss the matter, saying it had implications beyond the classified information that could be presented at trial.
“You cannot seriously argue that your recent copyright infringement concessions are unrelated to President Trump’s pending pretrial motions,” Branch wrote.
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