(TruthAndLiberty.com) – Special counsel Jack Smith has become frustrated with District Judge Aileen Cannon’s handling of the classified documents case as he argued that she had given credence to a “fundamentally flawed legal premise” presented by former President Donald Trump. Trump has argued that the classified documents that had been retrieved from his home in Mar-a-Lago had been his personal property.
The Tuesday night filling came after Canon had requested for the two sides to put forward jury instructions that would consider the perspective of the former President regarding the Presidential Records Act (PRA), which explicitly states how records created during a federal administration should be handled and archived.
According to the law, it is possible for some records to be seen as the president’s personal property, however, legal experts have opposed Trump’s view that over 300 highly classified records could possibly be considered personal.
Smith’s team has claimed that accepting Trump’s theory was going to cause a distortion of the trial. Prosecutors have argued that the distinction between what is presidential and personal records did not at all affect whether or not Trump’s possession of documents that contained classified national defense information was authorized under the Espionage Act. They further noted that the PRA should not have any role to play in the jury instructions and that based on the current record the PRA should not be included at all.
Prosecutors continued by pointing out that it was fiction to suggest that these types of classified documents could be considered to be “private.”
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