Special counsel Jack Smith’s team admitted in a motion filed with the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida on Friday that key evidence seized during the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2022 may have been manipulated. Specifically, the documents are no longer in the same sequence they were in at the time they were removed from the property.

The motion emphasized the painstaking process the government filter team used in handling the documents. The prosecutors informed Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over the case, that the “team took care to ensure that no documents were moved from one box to another, but it was not focused on maintaining the sequence of documents within each box.” 

Moreover, a footnote in the filing reads, “The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court.” Just the News Editor in Chief John Solomon put it a bit more bluntly: “Smith’s team … conceded it had misled the court about the problem by previously declaring that the evidence had remained in the exact state it had been seized.” 

The motion explains that FBI agents were “present when an outside vendor [digitally] scanned the documents” at the time they were seized but that other people, whom they assure the judge were “appropriate personnel,” have had access to them since that time. It goes on to admit that “there are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.”

The prosecutors offered “several possible explanations” for the movement, one being that “the 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.” 

Conspicuously missing from their list of theories was the possibility that the documents may have been put back in a different sequence after agents staged their infamous photo of classified documents spread out on the floor of Trump’s office at Mar-a-Lago. 

At any rate, despite the special counsel’s effort to minimize the implications of these changes and their failure to explain why they waited so long to inform the judge, this development will surely complicate Smith’s prosecution of the case. 

Former Trump defense lawyer Tim Parlatore told Just the News that Smith’s “admission is stunning on multiple levels.” First, he said it “reinforces the incompetence” of prosecutors “in conducting basic criminal investigations and prosecutions that I observed when I was on the team.” 

“But at a deeper level, the loss of specific document locations is a destruction of exculpatory evidence,” he said. “I went through all of the boxes at NARA [National Archives and Records Administration] and the document order was important because it was clear to us that the boxes had been untouched since leaving the White House.”

“For prosecutors who are trying to prove that the defendants knowingly possessed these documents to then destroy the evidence that would undermine that claim is a very serious violation,” Parliatore added.

Friday’s filing came just days after Cannon unsealed more than 300 pages of newly unredacted documents in the case. Investigative journalist Julie Kelly reported last week that “top Biden administration officials worked with NARA to develop” what would eventually become Smith’s case against Trump. 

According to Kelly, the new materials showed that, contrary to the administration’s claims that the Department of Justice (or the White House) had no involvement in Trump’s case until NARA sent a criminal referral in February 2022, DOJ officials had been in regular contact with NARA “during much of 2021.” The records also show that Deputy White House Counsel Jonathan Su “regularly communicated with Archive officials.”

After Trump’s legal team filed the “heavily redacted” documents in January, they asked Cannon to review the redactions and remove as many as she could. For obvious reasons, Smith has been fighting to keep the redactions in place, a fight he clearly lost on April 22 when the unredacted documents were made public.

Kelly reported that “[a] comparison of the redacted and unredacted material shows the Archives acted in concert with several Biden administration agencies to build the case — coordination that included the DOJ, the Biden White House, and the intelligence community.”

These latest developments leave us wondering what else the special counsel is trying to conceal. And still unanswered is the question of why Biden, former President Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and former FBI Director James Comey were never charged for the same or more serious violations.

The entire case smacks of a set-up, which is why Trump’s legal team has rightly filed several motions to dismiss it based on “selective and vindictive prosecution.” As evidence of the special counsel’s bad-faith dealings continues to mount, it’s possible that Cannon, a Trump appointee, might just comply.

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Elizabeth Stauffer is a contributor to the Washington Examiner, Power Line, and AFNN, and she is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation Academy. She is a past contributor to RedState, Newsmax, the Western Journal, and Bongino.com. Her articles have appeared on RealClearPolitics, MSN, the Federalist, and many other sites. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.