In the case involving former President Donald Trump’s confidential materials, Fox News legal commentator Gregg Jarrett seemed to imply that special counsel Jack Smith and his team of prosecutors were involved in the kind of sleazy behaviour that may get them into serious legal trouble.
In a Monday interview with Fox Business commentator Larry Kudlow, Jarrett accused special counsel Jack Smith of deceiving a judge over the preservation of evidence in case-related court papers.
According to the Western Journal, Smith’s prosecutors filed a report informing U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon that “the order of the documents changed after boxes of documents were seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, which the court did not learn about until now.”
Defendant Walt Nauta’s request for more time to ascertain the contents and arrangement of the confiscated documents was addressed in the submission. It indicated precisely which documents belonged in which boxes and in what order within those boxes. Legal experts have noticed that there is a problem with Smith’s petition because the sequence of the boxes now differs from earlier scans of them.
Because there were so many classified documents, the FBI ran out of cover sheets for the investigative team to use. At that point, the team started using blank sheets with handwritten notes indicating the classification level of the document(s) seized, according to the filing from Smith’s team. The detectives confiscated every box they discovered to contain documents with classification markings or presidential records.”
“The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” the document added.
“There are several possible explanations, including the above-described instances in which the boxes were accessed, as well as the size and shape of certain items in the boxes possibly leading to movement of items,” the filing said.
Jarrett declared that the misleading is “no small matter.”
“Prosecutors have a duty to preserve evidence, Larry, exactly as it is seized,” Jarrett said. “Jack Smith’s special counsel admits now in court documents altering, manipulating evidence against Trump. The digital scan of documents doesn’t match the physical order in the boxes that were seized.”
“And Smith got caught,” Jarrett continued. “His excuse, ‘Well, your honor, it is a complicated case, lots of documents,’ that is not an excuse. This is evidence tampering. It is destroying exculpatory evidence and even worse, Smith lied to the court and he was forced to admit it although he did so in a footnote, ‘gee, I misled the judge.’ This is no small matter, Larry.”