Special Counsel Jack Smith may have destroyed his own case with his careless handling of documents related to the prosecution of former President Donald Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents.
Department of Justice lead prosecutor in the case, Jay Bratt, admitted in a court filing that FBI agents brought cover sheets that said “top secret” on them when they conducted their raid of Mar-a-Lago, The Daily Caller reported.
They were used as placeholders for classified documents found at the former president’s residence but now they are admitting that they are out of order.
Attorneys who spoke to The Daily Caller said that the issue could affect the integrity of the case.
“It could [complicate the case]. I don’t know whether it will or not, but it certainly could,” Heritage Foundation’s Institute for Constitutional Government Vice President John Malcolm, who is also a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, said.
“The allegation or the argument would be, they’ve tampered with the evidence they’ve affected its integrity in some material way. I mean, it would be as if they had messed with somebody else’s DNA sample or had smudged the fingerprint,” he said.
He said it would ruin the prosecution’s argument that the former president had to know about the documents if they wanted to use that against him in the case.
“I don’t think anybody would believe that the President of the United States, upon leaving office, would personally be monitoring papers and effects. And it’s not inconceivable that something could get inadvertently mixed in, “criminal defense attorney and legal analyst Philip A. Holloway said.
“And so if prosecutors and law enforcement are cherry-picking documents, and slapping these labels on it that says top secret where that label was not already there, it can be very misleading to the viewer,” he said. “And if that viewer is a court, then that’s misleading a court, and that’s against the law.”
Bratt filed about the cover sheets in August.
“[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. See, e.g., Attachment F (redacted FBI photograph of certain documents and classified cover sheets recovered from a container in the ‘45 office’),” he said.
But in a more recent filing, he made an admission.
“[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,” he said.
