Special Counsel Jack Smith responded on Friday evening to a motion from Trump’s co-defendant Walt Nauta requesting an extension for disclosing documents in the classified case.
Nauta, a former White House employee and Navy veteran who worked as a valet for Trump and served at Mar-a-Lago, was indicted alongside Trump last year.
In his late-filed motion on Friday, Smith acknowledged that the FBI mishandled the boxes containing “classified” documents seized from Trump, leading to uncertainty about the order or placement of the documents.
In a May 1 filing, Walt Nauta’s attorney claimed he had 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.”
During his Friday night statement, Jack Smith acknowledged that the FBI had relocated the classified documents.
A footnote in the motion revealed that the FBI tampered with the boxes holding the ‘classified’ documents confiscated from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Despite previous assurances from the DOJ to the Court that the original placement of classified documents had been preserved, it has now come to light that they were dishonest.
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 falsely claimed to the Court that the red, blue, and yellow sheets shown in the viral photo of classified documents indicated their classification status, leading to a misleading representation.
It was revealed that the FBI had used “slip sheets” to substitute classified documents in Trump’s files.
The FBI confessed to tampering with the documents by utilizing cover sheets as temporary replacements for the classified materials.
“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 the FBI found so many classified documents that they ran out of ‘slip 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 laughably claimed.
“Yet more reason to throw out this sham prosecution,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said in response to Jack Smith’s filing.
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
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