Special counsel Jack Smith late on Tuesday delivered a new court filing in which he took a wrecking ball to jury instructions that were floated last month by Judge Aileen Cannon.
The filing, which was flagged by Politico's Kyle Cheney, tore apart Cannon's proposed instructions in which jurors are asked to consider whether the top-secret documents taken by former President Donald Trump could be seen as his own personal property and not official government records.
Smith came out firing in the first page and informed Cannon that her proposed "legal premise is wrong, and a jury instruction... that reflects that promise would distort the trial" of the former president.
Later in the filing, Smith's team tore apart Trump's contention that he was entitled to keep top-secret documents, including intelligence about a foreign country's nuclear weapons programs, after he was no longer president.
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"Trump's entire effort to rely on the PRA is not based on any facts," wrote Smith. "It is a post hoc justification that was concocted more than a year after he left the White House, and his invocation in this court of the PRA is not grounded in any decision he actually made during his presidency to designate as personal any of the records charge in the superseding indictment."
Smith then brings receipts from his own investigation to knock down any notion that Trump sincerely believed the documents were his personal property.
"During its exhaustive investigation, the government interviewed Trump's own PRA representatives and numerous high-ranking officials from the White House -- chiefs of staff, White House counsel and senior members of the White House Counsel's Office," he stated. "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. To the contrary, every witness who was asked this question had never heard such a thing."
