“There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,” prosecutors admit in legal filing to Judge Aileen Cannon.
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team admitted that key evidence in former President Donald Trump’s classified documents criminal case was tampered with since it was seized by the FBI.
They even admitted that prosecutors misled the court about it for a period of time, a revelation that could pose serious problems for Smith’s case.
“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 in a new court filing to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon on Friday.
“There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,” the prosecutors wrote.
Smith’s team even conceded in a footnote that it had misled the court about the problem by previously stating that the evidence had remained in the exact state it had been seized.
“The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” the footnote reads.
But Smith’s prosecutors also tried downplaying the problem by claiming that the order of the documents and boxes could have been scrambled or rearranged since the government took possession of them.
“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 prosecutors wrote. “For example, the boxes contain items smaller than standard paper such as index cards, books, and stationary, which shift easily when the boxes are carried, especially because many of the boxes are not full.”
But legal experts told Just The News that this development could spell trouble for Smith’s case.
“Prosecutors and investigators should never tamper with or alter evidence in their possession, including the order of documents in a box because one never knows what may become relevant or crucial to a court or jury later in a case,” Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz said.
Defense attorney Tim Parlatore, who had worked on Trump’s team in the documents case, claimed “this admission is stunning on multiple levels.”
“But at a deeper level, the loss of specific document locations is a destruction of exculpatory evidence,” he said. “I went through all of the boxes at NARA and the document order was important because it was clear to us that the boxes had been untouched since leaving the White House.”
“For prosecutors who are trying to prove that the defendants knowingly possessed these documents to then destroy the evidence that would undermine that claim is a very serious violation,” he added.
Read Jack Smith’s filing: