The former president made the demand on social media.
Former President Donald Trump argued that special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents case against him should be tossed after prosecutors wrote that they misled a judge about the order of items in an evidence box.
In a post on Truth Social over the weekend, President Trump called for the arrest of Jack Smith and argued that the case should be thrown out based on the new court filing.
It came after Mr. Smith’s team wrote that that the order of items within a box was “not the same” as they appear in digital photographs of materials after the FBI obtained those boxes from President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in August 2022.
“Since the boxes were seized and stored, appropriate personnel have had access to the boxes for several reasons, including to comply with orders issued by this Court in the civil proceedings noted above, for investigative purposes, and to facilitate the defendants’ review of the boxes,” Mr. Smith’s team told U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon last week.
They added that there are “some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.”
His team also acknowledged in a footnote that federal prosecutors effectively misled the court after telling the judge that the evidence was exactly the same when it was seized. “The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” the footnote said.
Mr. Smith’s team provided multiple “possible explanations” as to why the documents were rearranged after seizing the boxes from Mar-a-Lago, according to the filing.
“There are several possible explanations, including the above-described instances in which the boxes were accessed, as well as the size and shape of certain items in the boxes possibly leading to movement of items,” they wrote. “For example, the boxes contain items smaller than standard paper such as index cards, books, and stationary, which shift easily when the boxes are carried, especially because many of the boxes are not full.”
But President Trump wrote that Mr. Smith’s filing is effectively an admission of what he has “been saying happened since the Illegal RAID on my home, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach … that he and his team committed blatant Evidence Tampering by mishandling the very Boxes they used as a pretext to bring this Fake Case.”
