On Friday evening, Special Counsel Jack Smith responded to a motion filed by Trump’s co-defendant, Walt Nauta, seeking an extension for disclosures in the classified documents case.
Walt Nauta, a former White House employee and Navy veteran who served as a valet for Trump and worked as a personal staffer at Mar-a-Lago, was indicted alongside Trump last year.
In his response, Jack Smith admitted that the FBI had tampered with the boxes containing “classified” documents seized from Trump, resulting in uncertainty regarding the order and placement of the documents.
In a filing on May 1, Walt Nauta’s attorney expressed 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.”
In a footnote, Smith’s team quietly admitted that they had misled Judge Aileen Cannon’s courtroom regarding the issue. Previously, they had claimed that the evidence remained unchanged in its original state after seizure.
“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.
“There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,” the filing continued.
Footnote 3 (bolding added for emphasis): The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court. See, e.g., 4/12/24 Hearing Tr. at 65 (Government responding to the Court’s question of whether the boxes were “in their original, intact form as seized” by stating “[t]hey are, with one exception; and that is that the classified documents have been removed and placeholders have been put in the documents”
In August 2022, the Department of Justice deceived the Court when they asserted that the red, blue, and yellow sheets seen in the viral photo of the classified documents indicated their classification status.
This is how DOJ in August 2022 described the files in
— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) May 4, 2024
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
It turns out they were “slip sheets” the FBI used to replace the so-called classified documents.
The FBI admitted that they used cover sheets as placeholders for the classified documents.
“After the boxes were brought to WFO, the FBI created an index to correlate the documents with classification markings to codes (e.g., document “bb”) and labeled the classified cover sheets in the boxes with the codes for the seized documents. The FBI also generally replaced the handwritten sheets with classified cover sheets annotated with the index code, but regardless, any handwritten sheets that currently remain in the boxes do not represent additional classified documents—they were just not removed when the classified cover sheets with the index code were added. In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet.”
Jack Smith also claimed that the FBI found “so many classified documents” that they ran out of their supply of “cover sheets.”
“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,” Jack Smith claimed.
EVIDENCE TAMPERING? Biden DOJ/Jack Smith just admitted they messed with boxes supposedly containing “classified” documents they seized from Trump and can’t be sure the order or placement of the documents as originally found has been maintained — which is contrary to what they…
— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) May 3, 2024
You can read the filing HERE.
It was recently revealed that the General Services Administration (GSA) shipped several pallets of “document boxes” to Mar-a-Lago a year before the raid.
WELL WELL WELL I am pretty sure we never heard this part of the “classified documents/box” story!
— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) April 27, 2024
More from unredacted motions in FLA–this is from an unsealed transcript of witness interview.
FBI agent says GSA was holding large quantity of Trump’s boxes in VA and then ordered… pic.twitter.com/0i4tGdWZ9A
