Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team recently released new photos from the August 2022 search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. CNBC report.
Trump’s lawyer Plundering The case is dismissed on the grounds that evidence collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and kept by the prosecution team was not properly managed.
“The prosecution destroyed exculpatory evidence that supported one of the most fundamental defenses available to President Trump against the politically motivated charges in this case,” the motion states. “The government was more interested in fabricating doctored photos and leaking them to the press than in preserving crucial exculpatory evidence that is now lost forever.”
During the unprecedented raid, the Justice Department released photos showing messy stacks of documents with clearly marked classification marks.
“The haphazard way Trump has chosen to maintain his box.”
As previously reported by the Blaze News, Smith’s team acknowledged last month that color-coded covers of the photos had been brought in by investigators to be used as a placeholder for classified documents allegedly found at Mar-a-Lago.
“When investigative teams discovered documents marked with security marks, the documents were removed, segregated, and replaced with temporary sheets,” the May court filing stated. “In many cases, but not all, the FBI was able to determine which documents marked with security marks corresponded to specific temporary sheets.”
Prosecutors also acknowledged that the order of the items in the box had been changed since the documents were seized — something the special counsel said in a footnote he had previously told the judge was not true.
“The government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what government counsel previously understood and explained to the court,” the filing said.
Smith Responded The Supreme Court on Monday denied Trump’s motion to dismiss the case, saying the failure to keep the documents in order did not support the former president’s claim that he concealed them.
In a recent court filing, Smith reaffirmed that the FBI’s evidence response team had brought the cover.
“As part of its processing of the seized documents, which were deemed classified, ERT photographed the documents (which FBI officials had given appropriate covers) next to the boxes in which they were stored,” Smith said.
Court documents also state that the security camera server was “disabled at the request of the FBI to prevent recording” due to concerns about the safety of FBI agents.
Prosecutors have released new photos showing Trump’s reckless storage of allegedly classified documents.
“Mr. Trump argues that the precise order of the items in the box when it left the White House was material to his defense, given the haphazard way in which he chose to store the box,” Smith’s legal team wrote.
“The FBI agents who conducted the search conducted their search professionally, thoroughly and carefully under difficult circumstances, given the disarray of the boxes and the vast amount of classified documents in Mr. Trump’s custody,” the special counsel argued.
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