The Gateway Pundit reported in 2022 that the FBI created a fake crime scene at Mar-a-Lago by adding their own documents to the scene and doctoring the photo they released in their report and to the press.
In its response, the DOJ included a document it claims was taken at Mar-a-Lago during its raid. The photo was all over the news on Wednesday, August 31, the day after it was provided to the court.
The cover sheets in the photo that were red, yellow, and brown were inserted by the FBI. They were the FBI’s cover sheets. We know this for various reasons. The Trump White House did not need these cover sheets in the documents they held because they had their own cover sheets.
aThis documents were inserted. The FBI inserted these to indicate that the “agency implementing regulations” – i.e. the DOJ – is involved in the maintenance of these records but this is not the case. The President has the right to documents that are his. They are his property and an inserted document saying something different is simply not true.
Last month, Jack Smith admitted the FBI messed with the boxes containing “classified” documents they seized from Trump and can’t be sure the order or the placement of the documents.
In a May 1 filing, Walt Nauta’s attorney claimed he had difficulty in cross-referencing materials in classified and unclassified discovery because “certain items in the seized boxes he reviewed were in a different order from where they appear in the scans of the boxes’ contents produced in discovery.”
Then this week, Jack Smith admitted the FBI doctored evidence to produce stunt photos of classified documents during the Mar-a-Lago raid.
This contradicts their statement in August 2022, where the DOJ lied to the Court when it claimed that the red, blue, and yellow sheets shown in the viral photo of the classified documents indicated their classification status.
It turns out they were “slip sheets” the FBI used to replace the so-called classified documents. The FBI admitted they messed with Trump’s documents! The FBI used cover sheets as placeholders for the classified documents.
On Monday, federal prosecutors led by special counsel Jack Smith released a new set of photos that they claim show classified documents stored in a “haphazard manner” at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
The pictures, some of which had not been previously disclosed, were presented as exhibits in a recent court filing in South Florida.
Below are some of the photos released:
The Independent reported:
In photographs attached to a 33-page filing on Monday night, documents marked “secret” and “top secret” or bearing the White House emblem are seen stuffed in cardboard boxes alongside piles of golf shirts, sitting on top of old newspapers, and next to crates of Diet Coke.
One image shows a closet with newspapers and other documents spilling out on the floor from tipped-over boxes.
Smith’s team wrote that Trump “personally chose to keep documents containing some of the nation’s most highly guarded secrets in cardboard boxes along with a collection of other personally chosen keepsakes of various sizes and shapes from his presidency – newspapers, thank you notes, Christmas ornaments, magazines, clothing, and photographs of himself and others.”
After he left the White House in January 2021, Trump took his “cluttered collection of keepsakes” to his Florida home, “where the boxes traveled from one readily accessible location to another — a public ballroom, an office space, a bathroom, and a basement storage room,” according to prosecutors.
The photos were part of a court filing aimed at opposing Trump’s motion to dismiss the indictment based on the “spoliation” of evidence.
Recall that Trump’s legal team in February filed several motions to dismiss Jack Smith’s classified documents case. Judge Cannon previously denied Trump’s motion to dismiss the classified docs case on ‘unconstitutional vagueness’ of the Espionage Act, however, a third motion based on selective prosecution is still pending.
In his unsealed motion to dismiss, Trump highlighted how others, such as James Comey, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, and Bill and Hillary Clinton, all illegally possessed classified documents, yet they were never prosecuted.
Trump’s lawyers argued that Joe Biden stored boxes of classified documents in his garage, Penn Biden Center and Chinatown… all locations remained accessible to people without security clearances. Biden was never charged for stealing SCIF-designated documents and storing them in dilapidated boxes in his garage.
President Trump’s lawyers argued that former President Bill Clinton stored classified tapes in his sock drawer, yet he was never prosecuted.
Mike Pence disclosed to NARA that “a small number of documents bearing classified markings” were stored at his home in Indiana, yet he was never prosecuted.
Trump also slammed Hillary Clinton.
“Hillary Clinton and her colleagues deleted 31,830 emails and destroyed data on numerous electronic devices, including after a congressional preservation order,” Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche wrote referring to Hillary’s criminal email deletion and use of BleachBit to destroy emails under subpoena. Hillary also took a hammer to her BlackBerrys.
Trump’s defense also argues that FBI agents who executed the search warrant failed to maintain the order of the documents as they were found. They also claim that no photos were taken to show the sequence of records in each box containing them, according to CBS.
Trump’s legal team contends that this mismanagement of the documents’ sequence not only violated his due process rights but also undermines the claim that Trump was aware of the classified nature of the documents mixed with personal items.
CBS reported:
Smith’s team, though, argued in his latest filing that there is no basis for throwing out the charges against Trump because of a disruption of the precise order of documents seized from Mar-a-Lago.
“Trump personally chose to keep documents containing some of the nation’s most highly guarded secrets in cardboard boxes along with a collection of other personally chosen keepsakes of various sizes and shapes from his presidency,” prosecutors on the special counsel’s team said.
They accused the former president of maintaining the boxes containing sensitive material in a “haphazard manner” and said the FBI agents who conducted the search “did so professionally, thoroughly, and carefully under challenging circumstances.” Smith is separately seeking to bar Trump from making public statements that endanger law enforcement officers involved in the case. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over proceedings, did not seem receptive to prosecutors’ arguments to modify the conditions of his release during a hearing on the matter Monday.
It should be noted that the FBI turned off security cameras at Mar-a-Lago out of “concern for agent safety.”
“At approximately 9:55 am, the CCTV servers were turned off to prevent recording, at the request of the FBI, out of concern for agent safety,” Jack Smith’s prosecutors wrote. “At approximately 10:20 am, recording resumed at the request of Trump attorneys.”
