Who can forget that infamous photograph from the Biden Justice Department from the raid on Mar-a-Lago that showed a pile of documents with “secret” and “top secret” cover sheets messily strewn about on the floor?
Trump haters saw the photo as proof that Trump had grossly mishandled classified documents.
As we previously reported, the boxes containing classified documents had been in the National Archives’ possession before they requested that Trump’s people take them. As if it wasn’t enough that the Biden administration likely set up Trump, we now have proof that the infamous photo was staged.
“A few weeks after the armed FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, the Department of Justice released a stunning photograph depicting alleged contraband seized from Donald Trump’s Palm Beach estate that day; the image showed colored sheets representing scary classification levels attached to files purportedly discovered in Trump’s private office,” explains independent journalist Julie Kelly. “Included as a government exhibit to oppose Trump’s lawsuit requesting a special master to vet the 13,000 items taken from his residence, the crime scene pic immediately went viral — just as Attorney General Merrick Garland, who authorized the unprecedented raid, intended.”
The liberal media was happy to oblige with endless hysterical coverage of the implications of the photograph and how it incontrovertibly proved Trump’s guilt.
“New court filings in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s espionage and obstruction case against Trump and two co-defendants conclusively demonstrate that the government used the cover sheets to deceive the public as well as the court,” Kelly explains. “The photo was a stunt, and one that adds more fuel to this dumpster-fire case.”
In what must be considered not only an act of doctoring evidence but willfully misleading the American people into believing the former president is a criminal and threat to national security, agents involved in the raid attached the cover sheets to at least seven files to stage the photo.
Classified cover sheets were not “recovered” in the container, contrary to Bratt’s declaration to the court. In fact, after being busted recently by defense attorneys for mishandling evidence in the case, Bratt had to fess up about how the cover sheets actually ended up on the documents.
Kelly quotes Jay Bratt, who was serving as the lead DOJ prosecutor on the investigation at the time of the raid and is now on special counsel Jack Smith’s team. Originally, he claimed in an August 2022 court filing “[Thirteen] boxes or containers contained documents with classification markings, and in all, over one hundred unique documents with classification markings… were seized. Certain of the documents had colored cover sheets indicating their classification status.”
His story, however, has changed. He now says, “[If] the investigative team found a document with classification markings, it removed the document, segregated it, and replaced it with a placeholder sheet. The investigative team used classified cover sheets for that purpose.”
But before the official cover sheets were used as placeholder, agents apparently used them as props. FBI agents took it upon themselves to paperclip the sheets to documents—something evident given the uniform nature of how each cover sheet is clipped to each file in the photo—laid them on the floor, and snapped a picture for political posterity.
That raises many troubling questions, to say the least, about the FBI’s handling of the alleged incriminating documents.
For example, who made the on-site determination as to the classification level appropriate for each document? Did agents have security clearance and expertise related to classification? Did the agents know whether the document had been declassified by Trump while still in office?
Trump’s defense attorneys say that some cover sheets do not correspond to the correct documents — a mistake that the special counsel’s office has since acknowledged. According to Kelly, “This is a potentially case-blowing mistake, particularly if the document in question is one of the 34 records that represents the basis of espionage charges against Trump.”
On Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon indefinitely postponed Trump’s classified documents trial.