Jack Smith slams judge’s handling of Trump classified documents case over ‘fundamentally flawed’ order

Special counsel Jack Smith has slammed the judge presiding over Donald Trump’s federal classified documents case over an order in which she asked prosecutors and defence lawyers to file proposed jury instructions based on a “fundamentally flawed legal premise”.

Judge Aileen Cannon, who the former president appointed, appeared to accept an argument Mr Trump is pushing that he was entitled to retain sensitive documents at his home in Palm Beach, Florida, under a statute known as the Presidential Records Act (PRA).

The order, filed on 19 March, baffled legal experts and commentators and alarmed Mr Smith’s team. Prosecutors argue in a filing late on Tuesday that the 1978 law — which requires presidents to return presidential records to the government upon leaving office but allows them to keep purely personal ones — has no relevance in the case, which concerns Mr Trump refusing to return highly sensitive classified documents.

Materials retrieved by the federal agents during their search of the former president’s home at his private members’ club, Mar-a-Lago, were clearly not personal and there is no evidence to suggest that they were ever designated as such by Mr Trump.

Further, prosecutors argue that the suggestion that the former president did designate them as personal was “invented” only after it became public that he was in possession of boxes upon boxes of records from his time in office that should have been returned to the National Archives.

They also note that none of the witnesses interviewed in their investigation of how the boxes came to Mar-a-Lago, and what happened over the months in which the government tried to retrieve them, support Mr Trump’s version of events.

“Not a single one had heard Trump say that he