After months of hype, Jack Smith is promising to explain to America why Donald Trump stored classified documents at his Mar-A-Lago home. 

In a court filing pushing back on Trump's request to delay the trial, Smith pledged to prove "what Trump knew, and what Trump intended in retaining" the documents.

Smith teases intent

The case has received loads of sensational media coverage, but Trump's critics have yet to explain what nefarious purpose Trump had in keeping boxes of documents in his house.

Some have claimed, baselessly, that Trump was scheming to profit off of top-secret information, while others have suggested he kept the boxes as trophies. For his part, Trump has said he was preoccupied with other things and did not have time to sort through the materials.

Smith has claimed Trump withheld classified documents purposefully and obstructed the efforts of the government to get them back.

That conspiracy, Smith says, included a tentative plan to delete surveillance video that was never executed and Trump directing his personal aides to move boxes around so they would not be found during a search.

In his public statements, Trump has suggested he viewed the documents as his personal property, and that he was cooperating with efforts to recover them.

In July, Smith filed a superseding indictment charging Trump with retaining a document that Trump actually returned even before the FBI opened its probe.

Trump asks for delay

Trump has argued that the case is part of an overzealous witch hunt, and that the controlling statute is the Presidential Records Act, which is a civil law. Smith is pursuing Trump under the Espionage Act, which comes with serious criminal penalties.

The trial in the case is set to get underway in May, but Trump has asked to delay it, citing conflicts with a separate "election subversion" case that begins in March, which Smith is also overseeing.

Trump's lawyers contend that Smith's schedule is unreasonable and that he has not given Trump's lawyers the evidence they need to prepare a defense in the documents case.

"The special counsel's office is engaged in a reckless effort to try to obtain a conviction of President Trump prior to the 2024 election, no matter the cost," his lawyers wrote in a filing Wednesday. "The court should not permit the use of the criminal justice process toward that end."

Smith is also seeking to silence Trump with a gag order, leading Trump to accuse Smith of election interference on behalf of Joe Biden.