On May 3, special counsel Jack Smith‘s team admitted that they deceived U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon about the handling of evidence in one of the criminal investigations against former President Donald Trump.
In a court filing, prosecutors stated that the sequence of files in some of the boxes FBI investigators confiscated from President Trump’s Florida club had changed since shortly after the seizure.
Prosecutors compared scans of the boxes done in 2022 under Judge Cannon’s orders to the current state of the boxes and discovered that the arrangement 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,” the researchers noted.
In a footnote, prosecutors acknowledged that the update differs from what they told the judge less than a month ago during a hearing in the case.
When Judge Cannon questioned if 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 modified, but they proposed a suggestion.
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL“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 went on to say.
The admission was made in a filing in response to Walt Nauta, one of President Trump’s co-defendants, who requested an extension of the time to file papers under the Classified Information Procedure Act (CIPA).
Section 5 of the CIPA requires defendants to submit notice if they intend to expose classified information.
“Regardless of the explanation … where precisely within a box a classified document was stored at Mar-a-Lago does not bear in any way on Nauta’s ability to file a CIPA Section 5 notice,” prosecutors said, referring to the order of papers changing in some of the boxes from President Trump’s home.
Prosecutors said in the filing that the boxes were taken to the FBI’s Washington Field Office after being seized in Florida in August 2022. The FBI then constructed an index that linked papers with classification markings to codes, such as “bb,” and designated classified cover sheets in boxes with codes.
So, there you have it, folks. The FBI’s evidence-handling skills are about as organized as a college dorm room after a raging party. But hey, at least they’re keeping things interesting, right?
