The FBI purchased glossy cover sheets to use in photos of authorities’ unprecedented raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.
On Tuesday, journalist Julie Kelly posted court documents on X showing Special Counsel Jack Smith “admitted the FBI added cover sheets to alleged classified documents found at MAL and took photos for evidence.”
“This confirms my report from last month that the FBI doctored evidence to produce stunt photos of classified documents at [Mar-a-Lago],” Kelly said.
In May, District Court Judge Aileen Cannon ordered an indefinite postponement of the criminal classified documents case against the former president to allow an independent review of the documents in the case tampered with by prosecutors. Prosecutors admitted to mishandling the evidence triggering the delay demanded by the judge which now threatens the possibility for Smith’s team to go to trial before the November election.
According to Kelly on Tuesday, the FBI’s colored cover sheets were included in “classified discovery” implicating prosecutors’ desire to keep the details of the added documents concealed from the public.
“The FBI brought colored classified cover sheets to the raid under the guise of using them to substitute classified documents found within Trump’s boxes,” Kelly wrote on X. “Instead, FBI agents attached the scary looking sheets to various files and took photos.”
The images published by prosecutors became emblematic of the former president’s apparent irresponsibility illustrated from the raid. The documents became the feature photos for sensational stories in TMZ, ABC News, Newsweek, Business Insider, Fortune, The Guardian, the Independent, USA Today, and Rolling Stone.
Several weeks after federal stormtroopers combed through Trump’s private residence, the New York Times published an apparent explainer on “How the Picture of Top Secret Folders at Mar-a-Lago Came About.”
“On Wednesday, Mr. Trump took to his social media site to say that ‘the F.B.I., during the raid of Mar-a-Lago, threw documents haphazardly all over the floor (perhaps pretending that it was me that did it!), and then started taking pictures of them for the public to see,’” the Times reported. “But the genesis of the photograph appears to be in keeping with standard protocols for how federal agents handle evidence they come across in a search.”
The image of top-secret classified documents, however, was fake news.
The paper’s reporting is the kind of defensive coverage federal prosecutors have come to expect from friendly outlets. Additional court filings show the FBI was authorized to use “deadly force” against the former president during the Mar-a-Lago search. Trump is now facing 40 charges related to the alleged mishandling of classified documents from Smith’s probe.
President Joe Biden, on the other hand, escaped felony charges over his own mishandling of classified records in February after Special Counsel Robert Hur concluded the incumbent was too senile to face a jury.
“Biden would likely present himself to the jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” read Hur’s report. “It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
Hur’s team declined to press charges despite the Biden case including multiple troves of documents discovered across multiple locations including the president’s “garage, offices, and basement den.”
In his interview with Hur’s investigation, Biden confused current events with the war in Iraq, forgot when he was vice president, and couldn’t recall correct details around his son’s 2015 death from brain cancer.
“And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him,” read the Hur report.
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