The team of special counsel Jack Smith admitted on Friday that they had misled U.S. district judge Aileen Cannon about the evidence management in their criminal case concerning former President Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents.
The Epoch Times reports that prosecutors in a court document said the order of documents in some boxes FBI agents seized at President Trump’s Florida Resort had changed shortly after the seizure. The Epoch Times reports that prosecutors compared scans done in 2022 on orders of Judge Cannon with the current state of the box and noted the change.
The team Mr. Smith admitted that the order of the items in some boxes was not the same in the scans.
In a footnote to the report, the prosecutors admitted that this update was different from what they had told the judge during an earlier hearing, less than a month prior.
A prosecutor from the team responded that, when Judge Cannon asked if the boxes were in their “original, intact form” as seized, they “were, with one exception: the classified documents had been removed, and placeholders placed within the documents.”
The prosecution was unable to confirm the reason for the change in order but provided a theory.
The boxes contained items smaller than standard papers such as index cards and books. These easily shift when the boxes are carried, especially since many of them are not filled.
Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch wonders if Jack Smith’s team is tampering with evidence and points to the following “admission that the FBI completely screwed with the classified documents”.
The FBI then created an index of the documents that had been classified (e.g. document “bb”) and labeled all the classified cover pages in the boxes according to the codes. The FBI replaced handwritten sheets in most cases with classified cover pages annotated with index codes. However, the handwritten documents that remain in the boxes are not classified. They were simply not removed when a classified cover sheet with an index code was added. The FBI was able, in many cases but not always, to identify which document had classification markings that matched a specific placeholder sheet.
Fitton stated, “There is yet another reason to dismiss this phony prosecution.”
The revelation follows Judge Cannon’s recent disclosure of a cache of new documents that showed that an FBI agent testified in court that the General Services Administration was in Virginia with Trump’s boxes before Trump’s team was ordered to retrieve them. The GSA held the same boxes and had ordered Trump’s team to retrieve them. These boxes contained classified markings. This raises questions about whether or not the Biden administration set up Trump.
Trump initially blamed the GSA but later accused Trump of essentially stealing the documents and using this as a pretext to send the FBI to his Mar-a-Lago residence in August 2022.
