Bouncing Back: Jack Smith on Trial

In a stunning turn of events, [U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon], appointed by Donald Trump in 2020, is poised to make Smith a defendant of sorts.

Over the next several weeks, prosecutors will be forced to publicly counter defense motions that accuse the DOJ of selective and vindictive prosecution; insist the appointment of Smith is illegal; and claim that several parties, including Joe Biden’s White House, colluded behind the scenes as early as May 2021 to concoct the unprecedented case.

Her hearing schedule represents a broader spilling of bad blood between Cannon and the DOJ dating back to September 2022, when Cannon took the courageous step of appointing a special master, or third party, to vet the all of the evidence seized by the FBI during the armed raid of Mar-a-Lago the month before.

Noting at the time the prosecution’s suspected leaks to the news media and the mishandling of evidence in the early stages of the investigation — in addition to what she called the need for “public trust” in the case — Cannon granted Trump’s request for the special master.

Although the 11th Circuit Court overturned her order a few months later on grounds she did not have proper jurisdiction, Cannon now is exonerated amid disclosures by Smith in a May 3 brief that evidence has been mishandled and key documents possibly misplaced. “[There] are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans (taken right after the raid),” Smith’s team revealed, referring to 34 boxes taken from Mar-a-Lago.

Smith also revealed that in some instances, sheets of paper that FBI investigators used to replace classified records within a box do not match. “In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet,” Smith wrote.

In other words, the government officials prosecuting Trump with mishandling top-secret files –mishandled top-secret files.