On Monday night, Judge Aileen Cannon postponed a key deadline in the classified documents case following Special Counsel Jack Smith’s admission of evidence tampering.
Cannon has temporarily halted a May 9 deadline for President Trump and his co-defendants Walt Nauta and Carlos de Oliveira concerning CIPA.
President Trump’s legal team penned a letter to Jack Smith regarding his admission that classified documents were not in their original form.
“Your failure to disclose the spoliation of this evidence until this month is an extraordinary breach of your constitutional and ethical obligations. Since the beginning of this case, our strategy, preparations, and arguments have been based on the basic premise that — biased as Jack Smith is in his futile efforts to help President Biden make up lost ground in the polls — the line prosecutors and agents would employ the minimal levels of professionalism and competence necessary to preserve evidence relating to the documents at the center of the charges,” Trump’s lawyer wrote to the special counsel’s team.
On Friday evening, Special Counsel Jack Smith replied to a motion from Trump’s co-defendant, Walt Nauta, seeking to extend a deadline for disclosures in the classified documents case.
Recall, that Walt Nauta, a former White House employee and Navy veteran who worked as a valet for Trump and served as a personal staffer at Mar-a-Lago, was indicted alongside Trump last year.
In a motion filed late Friday, Jack Smith admitted the FBI messed with the boxes containing “classified” documents they seized from Trump and can’t be sure of the order or the placement of the documents.
In a filing dated May 1, Walt Nauta’s attorney asserted that he encountered challenges in cross-referencing materials in both 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 his response on Friday night, Jack Smith admitted that the FBI had rearranged the classified documents.
According to a footnote in the motion, the FBI messed with the boxes containing the ‘classified’ documents they seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
The DOJ previously assured the Court that the placement of classified documents as originally found had been maintained – THEY LIED!
Footnote 3: 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 misled the Court by falsely stating that the red, blue, and yellow sheets seen in the viral photo of the classified documents represented 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.
“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.”
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