EVIDENCE TAMPERING?

[Elderberry]

Tom Fitton
@TomFitton

EVIDENCE TAMPERING? Biden DOJ/Jack Smith just admitted they messed with boxes supposedly containing "classified" documents they seized from Trump and can't be sure the order or placement of the documents as originally found has been maintained -- which is contrary to what they assured the court! 

Footnote 3: The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel
previously understood and represented to the Court. See, e.g., 4/12/24 Hearing Tr. at 65
(Government responding to the Court’s question of whether the boxes were “in their original, intact
form as seized” by stating “[t]hey are, with one exception; and that is that the classified documents
have been removed and placeholders have been put in the documents”

And here is 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.
https://courtlistener.com/docket/6749007

https://twitter.com/TomFitton/status/1786532208334852584

[Right_in_Virginia]

Trump Whodunnit: Prosecutors admit key evidence in document case has been tampered with
Legal experts call revelation a “serious violation” as Jack Smith’s team admits it also misled court.
Just the News, May 3, 2024, John Solomon

In a stunning admission, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team is admitting that key evidence in former President Donald Trump’s classified documents criminal case was altered or manipulated since it was seized by the FBI, and that prosecutors misled the court about it for a period of time.

Legal experts told Just the News the revelation could prove to be a serious problem for prosecutors and a violation of court rules to preserve evidence in the state it was seized.

In a new filing Friday, Smith’s team said that the order of documents in some of the boxes of memos that were seized by the FBI from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate was altered or jumbled, leaving 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 in a new court filing to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon.

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

Smith’s team in a footnote also conceded it had misled the court about the problem by previously declaring that the evidence had remained in the exact state it had been seized.

"The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” the footnote said.

The organization of the documents in storage boxes at Mar-a-Lago is likely to be an important part of Trump‘s defense. His team is expected to argue the documents were stored in the White House in chronological order on the days that Trump received them, and that staff simply boxed them up and sent them to his home without him accessing them or knowing they contained classified information.

Smith’s team tried to downplay the problem and argued it’s not a reason for a delay in Trump’s case.

But several legal experts told Just the News the court filing essentially is an admission of evidence tampering, and could be problematic. 

Prominent defense attorney Tim Parlatore, who worked on Trump’s team earlier in the classified documents case but no longer is involved, said ”this admission is stunning on multiple levels.”

He said the revelation “reinforces the incompetence” of prosecutors “in conducting basic criminal investigations and prosecutions that I observed when I was on the team.

“But at a deeper level, the loss of specific document locations is a destruction of exculpatory evidence,” he added. “I went through all of the boxes at NARA and the document order was important because it was clear to us that the boxes had been untouched since leaving the White House.

“For prosecutors who are trying to prove that the defendants knowingly possessed these documents to then destroy the evidence that would undermine that claim is a very serious violation,” he added.


More:  https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/all-things-trump/trump-whodunnit-prosecutors-admit-key-evidence-document-case-has

[Right_in_Virginia]

Court filing here:  https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2024-05/gov.uscourts.flsd_.648653.522.0.pdf

[Right_in_Virginia]

Kyle Becker
@kylenabecker

Remember That Infamous Photo from the Trump Mar-a-Lago Raid? The FBI Staged It

It was a photo that instantly became one of the most infamous in presidential campaign history: The FBI's snapshot of "Top Secret" documents seized in its unprecedented raid on former President Donald Trump's office at Mar-a-Lago.

The Mar-a-Lago classified documents photo instantly became a media sensation and kicked off a wave of political prosecutions of the former president.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, who has become the tip of the spear for the Biden administration's election interference campaign against Biden's rival, finally admitted in a filing before Judge Aileen Cannon that the photo was effectively staged.

Justice reporter @julie_kelly2, in a lengthy thread, explained how the so-called Department of Justice staged the photo to effectively be a campaign ad against the former president.

"Remember the photo of 'classified docs' strewn on the floor with scary looking cover sheets to depict the classification level of various papers?" Kelly asked. "It appears those cover sheets, or slip sheets, were produced and used by the FBI after the raid."

Kelly deduced that those cover sheets are not the standard for such classified documents for a president's usage.

"The cover sheets do not represent the format in which the records were found--an intentional misrepresentation in the court docket for special master lawsuit and by the media," Kelly remarked.

"Jack Smith finally admitted yesterday the FBI used those sheets as placeholders (I mean, you can't really say 'props' to help stage a 'stunt') in his filing last night. Then laughably claimed FBI found so many classified records they ran out of stunt covers/slip sheets," she added.

This is the critical admission in the court filing:

If a box did not contain potentially privileged documents, the filter team provided the box to the investigative team for on-site review, and if the investigative team found a document with classification markings, it removed the document, segregated it, and replaced it with a placeholder sheet.

"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."





4:27 PM · May 4, 2024