Special Counsel Jack Smith Admits Prosecutors Misled Judge in Trump Case
Special counsel Jack Smith’s team on May 3 acknowledged they misled U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon regarding the handling of evidence in one of the criminal cases against former President Donald Trump.
Prosecutors in a court filing said that in some of the boxes FBI agents seized from President Trump’s Florida resort, the order of papers has been changed from shortly after the seizure.
Prosecutors compared scans of the boxes done in 2022 under orders from Judge Cannon to the present state of the boxes and noticed that the order is not the same.“There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,” Mr. Smith’s team said.
In a footnote, prosecutors acknowledged that the update contrasts with what they told the judge less than one month ago, during a hearing in the case.
When Judge Cannon during the hearing asked whether the boxes were “in their original, intact form as seized,” a prosecutor on the team said, “they are, with one exception; and that is that the classified documents have been removed and placeholders have been put in the documents.”
Prosecutors were unable to confirm why the order of papers was changed but offered a theory.
“The boxes contain items smaller than standard paper such as index cards, books, and stationary, which shift easily when the boxes are carried, especially because many of the boxes are not full,” they said.
The disclosure was made in a filing responding to a request from Walt Nauta, one of President Trump’s co-defendants, for an extension of a deadline to file papers under the Classified Information Procedure Act (CIPA)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment