Legal experts who have reviewed the recent filings by special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutors in the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump have identified a significant breach. The prosecutors have acknowledged tampering with evidence obtained from an FBI raid at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2023, and they have also been found to have provided misleading information to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon regarding certain aspects of the evidence and findings. This misconduct raises serious concerns about the integrity of the case.
“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,” the outlet reported.
As per a submission made by Smith’s team on Friday, it was revealed that the sequence of papers in certain memo boxes confiscated by the FBI from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property had been changed or mixed up, leading to two distinct timelines – one scanned digitally and the other following the original 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 the filing with Cannon’s court.
“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 also admitted in a footnote that they had provided false information to the court by claiming that the evidence had not been altered since it was originally seized.
“The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” the footnote said.
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.”
Nevertheless, several legal professionals informed the publication that tampering with and deceiving the judge could pose significant challenges 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 said.
Defense attorney Tim Parlatore, who previously served on Trump’s legal team in the classified documents case but is no longer involved, expressed his astonishment at this admission on various fronts. He emphasized that this revelation further highlights the ineptitude of Smith’s prosecutors in carrying out fundamental criminal investigations and prosecutions, which he personally witnessed during his time 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.