Smith team misstep

Special counsel Jack Smith’s team acknowledged Friday that some evidence in the prosecution of former President Donald Trump for hoarding classified documents at his Florida home may not be in the same sequence FBI agents found it when they swept into the Mar-a-Lago compound with a search warrant in August 2022.

The concession from prosecutors in a court filing Friday afternoon came after attorneys for one of Trump’s co-defendants asked for a delay in the case because the defense lawyers were having trouble determining precisely where particular documents had come from in the 33 boxes the FBI seized almost two years ago.

In their filing, prosecutors acknowledged the government had previously — and incorrectly — told U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon that the boxes remained “in their original, intact form as seized,” other than a decision to replace classified documents with placeholder sheets.

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“There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,” prosecutors wrote.

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Prosecutors claim the discrepancies in the sequence of the records is of no significance to the criminal case filed in June 2023. Smith’s lawyers say the apparent jumble took place despite various precautions, including having an FBI agent present while an outside vendor scanned the documents so that Trump’s attorneys could see what was seized.

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[Also], the boxes contain items smaller than standard paper such as index cards, books, and stationary [sic], which shift easily when the boxes are carried, especially because many of the boxes are not full,” prosecutors Jay Bratt, Julie Edelstein and David Harbach wrote.

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Prosecutors say despite the reordering, each box still contains precisely the same material it had in it when it was seized.

  

Doesn't matter. This will be seized upon by Trump and Cannon both to further denigrate the case against Trump.

“The investigative team used classified cover sheets for that purpose, until the FBI ran out because there were so many classified documents, at which point the team began using blank sheets with handwritten notes indicating the classification level of the document(s) seized,” the prosecutors wrote.

Later, they said, the handwritten notes were replaced with more formal placeholder sheets, but some of the handwritten ones may have been left in the boxes as well, complicating efforts to link a placeholder to a specific classified document.

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In a post on his Trump Social site Friday, Trump painted the disclosures at catastrophic for the government’s case.

Of course he did.

Smith “and his team committed blatant Evidence Tampering by mishandling the very Boxes they used as a pretext to bring this Fake Case,” Trump said, accusing prosecutors of “deeply illegal” actions that should trigger dismissal of all charges.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 05/07/2024: