During his appearance on Fox Business, legal analyst Gregg Jarrett insinuated that special counsel Jack Smith and his team of prosecutors may have engaged in deceptive tactics in the classified documents case involving former President Donald Trump. Jarrett specifically accused Smith of providing misleading information to a judge regarding the preservation of evidence in legal documents pertaining to the case.
Smith’s prosecutors told 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 submitted document pertained to defendant Walt Nauta’s plea for an extension to familiarize himself with the contents and arrangement of the confiscated documents. It explicitly specified the documents contained in each box and their proper sequence within said boxes. Smith’s submission highlighted the discrepancy between the current order of the boxes and the previously scanned versions, which legal experts consider to be a significant issue.
“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 finally ADMITTED that they 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 announced that this 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.”
Before I address the evidence-tampering filing posted by Special Counsel Jack Smith last night, let's turn to the motion that forced Smith to admit what happened–one filed by Walt Nauta's attorney on May 1.
Remember the photo of "classified docs" strewn on the floor with scary… pic.twitter.com/IOdHpRqAyu
— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) May 4, 2024
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.”