Special counsel shares new photos of Trump’s ‘haphazard’ classified doc storage after admitting to staging cover sheets
Special counsel Jack Smith’s team recently released new photographs from the August 2022 raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, CNBC reported.
Trump’s attorneys filed a spoliation motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that the evidence gathered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and stored by the prosecution team was not properly maintained.
“The prosecution team destroyed exculpatory evidence supporting one of the most basic defenses available to President Trump in response to the politically motivated charges in this case,” the motion read. “The government was more interested in staging—and leaking—manipulated photographs to the press than preserving key exculpatory evidence that has now been lost forever.”
At the time of the unprecedented raid, the Department of Justice released a photograph showing disorderly piles of papers with clearly labeled classification markings.
‘The haphazard manner in which Trump chose to maintain his boxes.’
Last month, Smith’s team admitted that the color-coded cover sheets in the photograph were brought in by the investigative team and used as placeholders for the alleged classified documents discovered at Mar-a-Lago, Blaze News previously reported.
“If the investigative team found a document with classification markings, it removed the document, segregated it, and replaced it with a placeholder sheet,” the May court filing read. “In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet.”
Prosecutors also admitted that the order of the items found inside the boxes had changed since the documents were seized. In a footnote, the special counsel stated that what it previously reported to the judge was untrue.
“The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” the filing stated.
Smith responded Monday to Trump’s motion to dismiss the case, arguing that the failure to maintain the order of the documents does not support the former president’s spoliation claim.
In Smith’s recent court filing, he again admitted that the FBI’s Evidence Response Team brought in the cover sheets.
“As part of the processing of seized documents marked classified, ERT photographed the documents (with appropriate cover sheets added by FBI personnel) next to the box in which they were located,” Smith stated.
The court filing also noted that the closed-circuit television servers “were turned off to prevent recordings, at the request of the FBI, out of concern for agent safety.”
The prosecution released new photographs that they claimed showed that Trump recklessly stored the alleged classified documents.
“Against this backdrop of the haphazard manner in which Trump chose to maintain his boxes, he now claims that the precise order of the items within the boxes when they left the White House was critical to his defense,” Smith’s team wrote.
“The FBI agents who conducted the search did so professionally, thoroughly, and carefully under challenging circumstances, particularly given the cluttered state of the boxes and the substantial volume of highly classified documents Trump had retained,” the special counsel argued.
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