Our friend Julie Kelly has done it again, busting open the lies at the heart of the Democrat lawfare against Donald Trump.
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…
Except…that is not what happened.
As Julie Kelly explained:
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. The photo was a stunt, and one that adds more fuel to this dumpster-fire case.
Jay Bratt, who was the lead DOJ prosecutor on the investigation at the time and now is assigned to Smith’s team, described the photo this way in his August 30, 2022 response to Trump’s special master lawsuit:
“[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. (Emphasis added.) See, e.g., Attachment F (redacted FBI photograph of certain documents and classified cover sheets recovered from a container in the ‘45 office’).”
The DOJ’s clever wordsmithing, however, did not accurately describe the origin of the cover sheets. 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.
Here is Bratt’s new version of the story, where he finally admits a critical detail that he failed to disclose in his August 2022 filing:
“[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.
As Julie Kelly noted, defense attorneys claim, and the special counsel concedes, that some placeholders do not match the relevant document. “Following defense counsel’s review of the physical boxes…and the documents produced in classified discovery, defense counsel has learned that the cross-reference provided by the Special Counsel’s Office does not contain accurate information,” attorneys representing Trump’s co-defendant Waltine Nauta wrote in a May 1 motion.
The motion forced the special counsel to admit the error. “In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet,” Bratt wrote.
In other words, wrote Ms. Kelly, in their zeal to stage a phony photo using official classified cover sheets, FBI agents might have failed to accurately match the placeholder sheet with the appropriate document. 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.
And there is another issue in connection with the cover sheets. Defense attorneys also noted that in at least one instance, the location of the cover sheet in the physical box didn’t match the FBI’s accounting. “[The] sheet…does not appear for several hundreds of pages later than the FBI Index indicated it would. Defense counsel’s review of these materials calls into question the likelihood that the contents of the physical boxes remains (sic) the same as when they were seized by the FBI on August 8, 2022.”
Which Bratt also admitted is an issue.
It is safe to assume, concluded Julie Kelly, that Judge Cannon will not take these new revelations lightly–particularly since Bratt also had to admit in the same filing that he did not tell her the truth when she asked about the condition of the boxes during a hearing last month.
In addition to the documents not being in the same order with prosecutors unaware of the reason, prosecutors had acknowledged that the scans provided to the defense were made by an outside vendor as part of a related civil case. The defense argued that process “lacked the constitutional, statutory, and ethical safeguards that guide discovery obligations in this criminal case.”
The Epoch Times reported attorneys for former President Donald Trump are seeking to push deadlines and file additional motions, including a possible request for sanctions, in the classified documents case prosecuted by special counsel Jack Smith after revelations that the order of files in the physical boxes of documents do not match the digital scans.
“These issues implicate, for example, President Trump’s motion to suppress evidence seized from Mar-a-Lago and the motion to dismiss based on prosecutorial misconduct,” defense attorneys argued.
The defense plans to request sanctions on the special counsel depending on the discovery produced by this request, and may also file a motion to dismiss charges “if the Office cannot prove in a reliable way how it seized and handled the key evidence in the case, which will be a central issue at any trial.”
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Trump documents case
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New York City trial
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Judge Cannon
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Joe Biden administration
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FBI doctored documents
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Christopher Wray
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2024 election
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Merrick Garland