The team led by Special Counsel Jack Smith is acknowledging that after the FBI obtained it, important evidence in the case involving the former president Donald Trump’s sensitive materials was changed or corrupted. Smith’s side has also acknowledged that it lied to the court for a while.
Smith’s team subtly acknowledged that the document order in some of the boxes that were taken from Mar-A-Lago was changed or jumbled in a court filing that was made public on Friday. In the end, this resulted in two distinct chronologies: a digitally scanned chronology and a physical chronology based on the box contents.
“Since the boxes were seized and stored, appropriate personnel have had access to the boxes for several reasons, including to comply with orders issued by this Court in the civil proceedings noted above, for investigative purposes, and to facilitate the defendants’ review of the boxes,” Smith’s team wrote.
“There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,” the filing continued.
It is anticipated that a key component of Trump’s legal defense in this lawsuit will be how the boxes are arranged. Trump’s legal team has contended that his aides sent the documents to his house without accessing them or realizing they contained secret material, and that the records were kept in chronological order in the White House on the days that Trump received them.
A full year prior to the raid, it was disclosed that the federal government had sent many pallets filled with “document boxes” from the Trump Administration to the former president’s Mar-a-Lago home.
Two of the six pallets that were supposed to be moved were sent straight to Mar-a-Lago from an Arlington, Virginia facility, according to a Federalist story. The move was a part of a bigger operation that included moving federal government property and equipment required to close down the Office of the Former President.
