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Special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutors have made an astonishing admission in a new court filing to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon regarding former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case.
In the filing, Smith revealed “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.
“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 said.
“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.
“For example, 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,” prosecutors wrote.
However, the details are a vital part of the prosecution’s case against Trump, the first former president or high-ranking elected official to be charged with possessing classified documents. Part of Trump’s defense is expected to be that documents were packed in chronological order, with no regard for classification marking, the Western Journal noted, citing legal experts.
“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,” Just the News noted further.
Just the News added:
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.
However, a number of legal experts told the outlet that the tampering and misleading the judge may very well prove to be problematic for Smith’s team.
“Prosecutors and investigators should never tamper with or alter evidence in their possession, including the order of documents in a box, because one never knows what may become relevant or crucial to a court or jury later in a case,” Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz told the outlet.
Defense attorney Tim Parlatore, who worked on Trump’s team earlier in the classified documents case but is no longer involved, said,” This admission is stunning on multiple levels.”
He said the revelation “reinforces the incompetence” of Smith’s 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 told Just the News. “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.
