Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team slammed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon for issuing an order asking prosecutors and defense attorneys involved in the Trump classified documents case to file proposed jury instructions based on what Smith alleges is a “fundamentally flawed legal premise.”
Cannon accepted the argument from Trump’s legal team that the President Records Act (PRA) permitted the former President to keep sensitive documents at this home in Palm Beach, Florida. The PRA, enacted in 1978, permits former presidents to retain personal documents after leaving office but mandates that outgoing presidents return all official presidential records to the National Archives.
On Tuesday, Smith and his team submitted a filing claiming the PRA is irrelevant to the case. “Not a single one had heard Trump say that he was designating records as personal or that, at the time he caused the transfer of boxes to Mar-a-Lago, he believed that his removal of records amounted to designating them as personal under the PRA,” the filing claims.
Smith is leading what many observers believe to be a politically motivated investigation into Trump’s handling of classified material. In December of last year, a CNN analyst said Smith was trying to jail Trump before the election. The same month, the Supreme Court denied Smith’s request for an expedited hearing on Trump’s presidential immunity claims. Adding to concerns about Smith’s impartiality in the case are revelations that the Justice Department is trying to hide the identities of individuals who work for the special prosecutor.