Special Counsel Jack Smith, already under fire from the right for taking part in an allegedly highly politicized pair of cases against former President Donald Trump, has just given his critics another reason to be suspicious of his and the Biden Justice Department’s motives.
Smith’s team has acknowledged that some important evidence related to the classified documents case of former President Donald Trump was altered or manipulated after it was seized by the FBI. Furthermore, Smith’s team has admitted that the court was misinformed for a certain period of time.
In a legal filing released Friday, Smith’s team quietly admitted that the order of documents in some of the boxes that were seized from Mar-A-Lago was altered or jumbled. This ultimately left two different chronologies: one that was digitally scanned and another the physical order in the boxes.
“Since the boxes were seized and stored, appropriate personnel have had access to the boxes for several reasons, including to comply with orders issued by this Court in the civil proceedings noted above, for investigative purposes, and to facilitate the defendants’ review of the boxes,” Smith’s team wrote. “There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,” the filing continued.
In a footnote, Smith’s team admitted to misleading U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s courtroom by claiming the evidence remained in its original state after being seized. “The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” the footnote said.
The arrangement of the boxes is anticipated to play a crucial role in Trump’s legal defense in the case. Trump’s legal team contends that the documents were organized chronologically while stored in the White House on the days they were received by Trump. Furthermore, they assert that Trump’s staff merely forwarded the documents to his residence without accessing them or being aware of any classified information they contained.
In a previous disclosure, it was revealed that the federal government had sent several pallets of “document boxes” from the Trump Administration to his Mar-a-Lago estate one year before the raid.
As reported by The Federalist, two out of six pallets earmarked for relocation were dispatched from an Arlington, Virginia facility directly to Mar-a-Lago. This action was a component of a broader operation aimed at transferring materials essential for winding down the Office of the Former President, along with items belonging to the federal government.
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