It is the picture that launched a thousand pearl-clutching articles.
A few weeks after the armed FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, the Department of Justice released a stunning photograph depicting alleged contraband seized from Donald Trump’s Palm Beach estate that day; the image showed colored sheets representing scary classification levels attached to files purportedly discovered in Trump’s private office.
Included as a government exhibit to oppose Trump’s lawsuit requesting a special master to vet the 13,000 items taken from his residence, the crime scene pic immediately went viral — just as Attorney General Merrick Garland, who authorized the unprecedented raid, intended.
At the time, even regime-friendly mouthpieces questioned the need and optics of the raid; the photo helped juice the DOJ’s justification for the storming of Trump’s castle.
“[The] question of whether Trump had classified material with him at his Mar-a-Lago resort has captured the public’s attention. The photo published by the government appears to answer that question quite affirmatively,” Washington Post resident fact checker Philip Bump wrote on August 31, 2022.
Some of Bump’s colleagues were more hyperbolic. An ex-CIA officer told ABC News the cover sheets indicated the highest level of secrecy, which in the wrong hands could have resulted in murder. “People’s lives are truly at stake. Without being melodramatic, anything that helps an adversary identify a human source means life and death,” intelligence expert Douglas London melodramatically warned in reaction to the photo.
The New York Times insisted the photo was consistent with how the FBI handles criminal investigations. “[It] is standard practice for the F.B.I. to take evidentiary pictures of materials recovered in a search to ensure that items are properly cataloged and accounted for. Files or documents are not tossed around randomly, even though they might appear that way; they are usually splayed out so they can be separately identified by their markings,” reporters Glenn Thrush and Adam Goldman wrote on August 31, 2022.
Except…that is not what happened.
A Stunt with Potentially Case-Killing Consequences for DOJ
New court filings in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s espionage and obstruction case against Trump and two co-defendants conclusively demonstrate that the government used the cover sheets to deceive the public as well as the court. The photo was a stunt, and one that adds more fuel to this dumpster-fire case.
Jay Bratt, who was the lead DOJ prosecutor on the investigation at the time and now is assigned to Smith’s team, described the photo this way in his August 30, 2022 response to Trump’s special master lawsuit:
“[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. (Emphasis added.) See, e.g., Attachment F (redacted FBI photograph of certain documents and classified cover sheets recovered from a container in the ‘45 office’).”
The DOJ’s clever wordsmithing, however, did not accurately describe the origin of the cover sheets. In what must be considered not only an act of doctoring evidence but willfully misleading the American people into believing the former president is a criminal and threat to national security, agents involved in the raid attached the cover sheets to at least seven files to stage the photo.
Classified cover sheets were not “recovered” in the container, contrary to Bratt’s declaration to the court. In fact, after being busted recently by defense attorneys for mishandling evidence in the case, Bratt had to fess up about how the cover sheets actually ended up on the documents.
Here is Bratt’s new version of the story, where he finally admits a critical detail that he failed to disclose in his August 2022 filing:
“[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.”
But before the official cover sheets were used as placeholder, agents apparently used them as props. FBI agents took it upon themselves to paperclip the sheets to documents — something evident given the uniform nature of how each cover sheet is clipped to each file in the photo — laid them on the floor, and snapped a picture for political posterity.
That raises many troubling questions, to say the least, about the FBI’s handling of the alleged incriminating documents.
For example, who made the on-site determination as to the classification level appropriate for each document? Did agents have security clearance and expertise related to classification? Did the agents know whether the document had been declassified by Trump while still in office?
The hasty assessment also appears to contradict Bratt’s statements in court about the classification status of the seized documents. Bratt told Judge Aileen Cannon during a hearing last year that the records were undergoing a classification review, presumably conducted by the intelligence community, to determine the correct level of secrecy.
Did the final analysis confirm or dispute the assessments by the field FBI agents who conducted the raid?
Missing Paper Trial and Messy Boxes
But Jack Smith might have bigger problems. During the raid, agents took a box in its entirety if it contained papers with classified markings; the box usually contained other items, which is how the FBI ended up with so many of Trump’s personal belongings.
So, in order to flag the location of the alleged classified record in the box, agents, as Bratt noted, used the cover sheets as placeholders. (The classified records were then placed in a separate secure file.)
But now defense attorneys claim, and the special counsel concedes, that some placeholders do not match the relevant document. “Following defense counsel’s review of the physical boxes…and the documents produced in classified discovery, defense counsel has learned that the cross-reference provided by the Special Counsel’s Office does not contain accurate information,” attorneys representing Trump’s co-defendant Waltine Nauta wrote in a May 1 motion.
The motion forced the special counsel to admit the error. “In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet,” Bratt wrote.
In other words, in their zeal to stage a phony photo using official classified cover sheets, FBI agents might have failed to accurately match the placeholder sheet with the appropriate document. This is a potentially case-blowing mistake, particularly if the document in question is one of the 34 records that represents the basis of espionage charges against Trump.
And there is another issue in connection with the cover sheets. Defense attorneys also noted that in at least one instance, the location of the cover sheet in the physical box didn’t match the FBI’s accounting. “[The] sheet…does not appear for several hundreds of pages later than the FBI Index indicated it would. Defense counsel’s review of these materials calls into question the likelihood that the contents of the physical boxes remains (sic) the same as when they were seized by the FBI on August 8, 2022.”
Which Bratt also admitted is an issue. After the boxes were transported from Florida to the hopelessly corrupt Washington FBI field office (another scandalous aspect of the case since the investigation should have been conducted in southern Florida not in another jurisdiction), a private company took scans of the inside of the boxes. But according to the defense team, the current condition of the boxes does not match the scans taken in August 2022.
Bratt explained that “there are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.” He then offered a list of excuses including how some “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.”
It is safe to assume Judge Cannon will not take these new revelations lightly — particularly since Bratt also had to admit in the same filing that he did not tell her the truth when she asked about the condition of the boxes during a hearing last month. On April 12, Cannon directly asked Bratt, “are the boxes in their original, intact form as seized?” Bratt replied yes, but “with one exception, and that is that the classified documents have been removed and placeholders have been put in the documents [place.]”
Oof.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, Jack Smith’s team might need several thousand words to weasel their way out of this mess.
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Julie Kelly is an independent journalist covering the weaponization of the U.S. Government against her citizens, Follow Kelly on Twitter / X.
