On Friday, special counsel Jack Smith’s team admitted to misleading U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon concerning the management of evidence in their criminal case involving former President Donald Trump's alleged mishandling of classified documents.
"Prosecutors in a court filing said that in some of the boxes FBI agents seized from President Trump’s Florida resort, the order of papers has been changed from shortly after the seizure,” reports The Epoch Times. "Prosecutors compared scans of the boxes done in 2022 under orders from Judge Cannon to the present state of the boxes and noticed that the order is not the same."
“There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,” Mr. Smith’s team admitted in the filing.
In a footnote, prosecutors acknowledged that the update contrasts with what they told the judge less than one month ago, during a hearing in the case.
When Judge Cannon during the hearing asked whether the boxes were “in their original, intact form as seized,” a prosecutor on the team said, “they are, with one exception; and that is that the classified documents have been removed and placeholders have been put in the documents.”
Prosecutors were unable to confirm why the order of papers was changed but offered a theory.
“The boxes contain items smaller than standard paper such as index cards, books, and stationary, which shift easily when the boxes are carried, especially because many of the boxes are not full,” they said.
Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, wonders if Jack Smith’s team was tampering with evidence, and pointed to the following as an "admission of the FBI completely screwing with the classified documents”:
After the boxes were brought to WFO, the FBI created an index to correlate the documents with classification markings to codes (e.g., document “bb”) and labeled the classified cover sheets in the boxes with the codes for the seized documents. The FBI also generally replaced the handwritten sheets with classified cover sheets annotated with the index code, but regardless, any handwritten sheets that currently remain in the boxes do not represent additional classified documents—they were just not removed when the classified cover sheets with the index code were added. In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet.
"Yet more reason to throw out this sham prosecution,” Fitton said.
This revelation comes in the wake of Judge Cannon unsealing a trove of new documents in the case that revealed that an FBI agent had testified that the General Services Administration (GSA) was in possession of Trump's boxes in Virginia before ordering Trump's team to come get them. The same boxes that the GSA had been holding and ordered Trump’s team to retrieve ended up being the boxes that contained classified markings, raising questions about whether the Biden administration had set up Trump.
Related: New Bombshell Evidence Emerges: Was Trump Set Up in Classified Docs Saga?
Trump had previously blamed the GSA for packing the boxes that contained the classified documents, only to later accuse Trump of essentially stealing them and using that as pretext for sending the FBI to raid his Mar-a-Lago home in August 2022.
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