OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett appeared to suggest that special counsel Jack Smith and his team of prosecutors engaged in the kind of chicanery in former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case that could land them in hot water.
Jarrett, during an interview with Fox Business host Larry Kudlow on Monday, accused special counsel Jack Smith of misleading a judge about evidence preservation in legal filings related to the case.
In their filing, Smith’s prosecutors informed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon “that after boxes of documents were seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, the order of the documents changed, which the court did not learn about until now,” the Western Journal reported.
The filing addressed defendant Walt Nauta’s request for additional time to learn the contents and organization of the documents seized. It specifically identified which documents were in which boxes and the correct sequence of the documents within those boxes. Smith’s filing noted that the current order of the boxes doesn’t match scans of them that were made earlier, which is a problem, according to legal experts.
“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,” Smith’s team said in the filing. “The investigative team seized any box that was found to contain documents with classification markings or presidential records.”
“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,” the Justice Department prosecutors wrote.
“There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,” the document said.
Smith’s prosecutors then admitted they had misled the court.
“The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” the document added.
“There are several possible explanations, including the above-described instances in which the boxes were accessed, as well as the size and shape of certain items in the boxes possibly leading to movement of items,” the filing said.
Jarrett declared that the misleading is “no small matter.”
“Prosecutors have a duty to preserve evidence, Larry, exactly as it is seized,” Jarrett said. “Jack Smith’s special counsel admits now in court documents altering, manipulating evidence against Trump. The digital scan of documents doesn’t match the physical order in the boxes that were seized.”
“And Smith got caught,” Jarrett continued. “His excuse, ‘Well, your honor, it is a complicated case, lots of documents,’ that is not an excuse. This is evidence tampering. It is destroying exculpatory evidence and even worse, Smith lied to the court and he was forced to admit it although he did so in a footnote, ‘gee, I misled the judge.’ This is no small matter, Larry.”
This is how DOJ in August 2022 described the files in
a filing to Judge Cannon with accompanying photo that went viral to make it appear that this was the original form of the documents seized by FBI.This does not appear to be the truth–at all. It instead appears that the… pic.twitter.com/yGAgYJMZEt
— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) May 4, 2024
“The chronology of documents is vital to Trump’s defense. The staff boxed up exactly what they received from the GSA that was sent to Mar-a-Lago,” Jarrett said. “And we also know the National Archives coordinated with Joe Biden’s White House and the Biden DOJ on how to bring criminal charges against Donald Trump. So one can argue that Trump is the victim of a setup.”
Trump also addressed the development in a Truth Social post.
“It has always been clear that the ‘Documents Case’ is nothing but an Election Interference Scam concocted by Crooked Joe Biden, Deranged Jack Smith, and their Hacks and Thugs,” Trump posted. “Now, Deranged Jack has admitted in a filing in front of Judge Cannon to what I have been saying happened since the Illegal RAID on my home, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida – That he and his team committed blatant Evidence Tampering by mishandling the very Boxes they used as a pretext to bring this Fake Case.”
