Trump puts forward new effort to throw out classified documents case

Former President Donald Trump has once again asked a judge to throw out the classified documents case, arguing this time that investigators destroyed exculpatory evidence by rifling through boxes for classified documents gathered in the FBI’s 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago.

Former President Donald Trump has once again asked a judge to throw out the classified documents case, arguing this time that investigators destroyed exculpatory evidence by rifling through boxes for classified documents gathered in the FBI’s 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago. The motion filed late Monday touches on allegations that have already come up in court – that the Justice Department allegedly tampered with evidence that would have been good for the former president. One of Trump’s codefendants asked Judge Aileen Cannon in May for a delay in the case because defense attorneys were struggling to understand the order of documents in the dozens of boxes seized by the FBI. Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has already acknowledged in court that some of the documents may be out of order. In a May court filing, prosecutors wrote that “there are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,” adding in a footnote that “the Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court.” Trump’s defense lawyers claim in their motion Monday that classified documents found during the search were “buried in boxes and comingled with President Trump’s personal effects from his first term in office,” so it was likely that the former president had no idea what was in the boxes – let alone if there were classified documents inside. But, according to Trump, those boxes have been tampered with because investigators failed to maintain the order of their contents. Investigators “made little if any effort to document the location of seized items within a box or to maintain the order of documents within each box that they searched,” defense attorneys wrote. The individuals who searched the boxes showed a “callous attitude toward President Trump’s rights and a disregard of basic professionalism,” the attorneys wrote.