Trump team seeks dismissal of classified docs case over alleged evidence tampering

Former President Donald Trump's legal team on Tuesday announced a motion to dismiss special counsel Jack Smith's classified documents case, just one day after U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon rejected a separate motion for dismissal.

"President Trump’s attorneys have filed a powerful motion asking Judge Cannon to fully and completely dismiss the 'boxes' Hoax due to the illegal actions by Crooked Joe Biden’s Department of Injustice in its shocking failure to preserve the boxes taken from President Trump’s home in the unconstitutional and unAmerican raid on Mar-a-Lago," Trump Communications Director Steven Cheung said in a statement.

"Deranged Jack Smith was forced to admit in a public filing that he and his Thugs committed blatant Evidence Tampering by mishandling the very documents they used as pretext to bring this Fake Case. This scam, and all other Crooked Joe - directed Witch Hunts against President Trump, should be DROPPED IMMEDIATELY," he added.

Smith's office in May admitted that key evidence in the case had been altered or manipulated since its seizure by the FBI and that prosecutors had misled the court. 

“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,” the office informed Cannon. “There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans."

"The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” his office also wrote.

Trump has previously filed a litany of motions to dismiss the charges, all of which Cannon has thus far rejected. In April, for instance, she rejected a dismissal bid in which Trump argued that the documents he stored at Mar-a-Lago were his personal records.