Julie Kelly: DOJ Finally Admits They Doctored Trump's "Classified" Documents by Putting Them Inside Classified Information Folders, and Then Propagandizing the Country With Photos of Them
Why is this important?
Because the media seized on the idea -- no doubt intended by Merrick Garland's criminal gang at the DOJ -- that the fact that the "classified' documents were in folders plainly marked CLASSIFIED means that Trump could have no possible question that they were in fact classified, and no defense at any future trial.
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.
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.
AND THEN THERE'S THIS:
BREAKING: Judge Cannon Indefinitely Postpones Jack Smith’s Classified Documents Trial After Special Counsel Admits to Evidence Tampering
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