(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) Special Counsel Jack Smith admitted in a recent filing that the FBI had manipulated alleged classified documents found at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate during a raid by federal attack dogs.
This admission followed complaints from Trump’s co-defendant, Walt Nauta, who raised concerns about the accuracy of the chain of custody for materials seized during the August 2022 raid.
Responding to Nauta’s concerns, Smith conceded Friday that his prosecutors had misled U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon by asserting that the documents were maintained “in their original, intact form as seized.”
Instead, Smith clarified that “there are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.”
In a footnote, Smith further clarified, “The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court.”
Adding to the controversy was Smith’s acknowledgment that the FBI deliberately inserted coversheets marked “Secret” and “Top Secret” for purported classified documents.
These coversheets gained national attention when the DOJ released photos, claiming they were evidence of classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago. However, Smith revealed that the coversheets were brought to the estate by federal agents.
Smith detailed the process, stating: “If a box contained potentially privileged material and fell within the scope of the search warrant, the filter team seized the box for later closer review.”
He further explained, “If a box did not contain potentially privileged documents, the filter team provided the box to the investigative team for on-site review, and if the investigative team found a document with classification markings, it removed the document, segregated it, and replaced it with a placeholder sheet.”
Smith is presently leading the case against Trump, alleging that the former president transported classified documents to Mar-a-Lago and refused to surrender them to the government.
However, these claims have been undercut by accusations of damning partisanship within the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the agency tasked with saving historic classified documents.
Despite the purported urgency in safeguarding classified documents, NARA inexplicably overlooked allegations that President Joe Biden, during his tenure as vice president, withheld such documents in his Delaware home and Washington, D.C. office.
Unlike Trump, Biden lacked the authority to declassify documents. Yet, despite alleged evidence uncovered by Special Counsel Robert Hur suggesting Biden’s willful retention of classified documents, he has not faced criminal charges.
Trump has frequently cited the Biden case as evidence of a two-tier justice system.
