By “It is the picture that launched a thousand pearl-clutching articles,” explained Julie Kelly, an investigative reporter working on how the FBI has worked to undermine former President Trump’s campaign to reclaim the White House.
“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 national media went bonkers for the photos.
“[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’s “fact checker” Philip Bump wrote on August 31, 2022.
Now, according to new court filings, writes The Daily Caller, much of the infamous scene was a set up by the FBI, which brought “props” to Mar-a-Largo in an apparent attempt to embarrass Trump.
Jay Bratt, the lead Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutor now assigned to special counsel Jack Smith’s team, admitted in a recent court filing that FBI agents brought cover sheets reading “top secret” to the raid of Mar-a-Lago to use as placeholders in their gathering of classified documents. The classified documents, however, now appear to be out of order following their seizure, both Trump’s defense attorney and the special counsel have admitted, according to court documents first reported by Declassified with Julie Kelly.
The crime scene photo of classified documents allegedly found at Mar-a-Lago, complete with the bright red “classification” cover sheets, went viral in the weeks after the raid. Corporate media outlets breathlessly reported on the photo and the cover sheets as proof that Trump had been storing classified documents at his Florida property.
“[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,” Bratt wrote in a recent filing.
In a May filing, Waltine Nauta, Trump’s defense attorney, wrote that the placeholders which the FBI brought to the scene to mark classified documents in stacks were out of place.
Jim Jordan, the Republican member of the House investigating the ways in which the Biden Administration uses its power to attack critics, announced that the revelation about the staged photos will be looked at by Congress.
Fox News writes, “House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan is investigating whether evidence seized by the FBI in its raid on former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s classified records case was ‘altered or manipulated.’
Jordan, R-Ohio, sent a letter to the Office of Professional Responsibility this week after Smith admitted that seized documents are no longer in their original order and sequence.
Smith and federal prosecutors admitted in a court filing on Friday that ‘there are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.’ The prosecutors had previously told the court that the documents were ‘in their original, intact form as seized.'”
Democrats have genuinely become convinced that maintaining their power is the only way to “defend democracy” and it’s becoming more and more apparent that they’re willing to do anything to stop Trump.
Jordan, in his letter, said the acknowledgment ‘presents grave concerns’ about the Justice Department’s “commitment to impartial justice, whether the Special Counsel’s Office misled a federal court, whether the Special Counsel’s Office strenuously upheld the ‘highest professional standards’ of the Department of Justice.”
The judge in the classified documents case has suspended a key deadline after the alleged staging was made public.
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