![Fire :fire: 🔥](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/6.6/png/unicode/64/1f525.png)
CNN published an chastened op-ed yesterday evening titled “
Honig: The prosecutors may have gone ‘a little too far’ during Stormy Daniels testimony.” That’s what
she said.
Most of the media’s column inches on the various Trump cases yesterday were devoted to washed-up, B-roll pornographer Stormy Daniels’ play-by-play descriptions of ancient alleged intimate encounters with the former President.
By all accounts, her testimony was X-rated, undignified, unworthy of the Court, and totally over the top, which resulted in
Trump’s exasperated team seeking a mistrial at least once. Judge Merchan, who at times even tried himself to shut Stormy up, denied the mistrial motion but admitted that lots of salacious stuff should never have been said. As you know, we
always take the high road here at C&C, and I won’t dignify Stormy’s wild stories of presidential spankings any further.
The utter lack of dignity and self-respect in these proceedings make for some kind of metaphor here, but I’ll leave exploring that to you guys in the comments.
![Fire :fire: 🔥](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/6.6/png/unicode/64/1f525.png)
![Fire :fire: 🔥](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/6.6/png/unicode/64/1f525.png)
Much more interesting, and much
less covered, were developments in Trump’s much more dangerous classified documents case. CNN ran a tearful story yesterday headlined, “
Federal judge indefinitely postpones Trump classified documents trial.”
This case, arising from FBI’s dramatic raid on Mar-a-Lago, is one of the three
other criminal cases pending against Trump, besides the Stormy Daniels’ mischaracterized expenses case. The classified documents case has long been considered the most serious case, the case offering liberals their best hopes for undemocratically derailing Trump’s presidential ambitions.
But some remarkable issues have arisen with the evidence. CNN’s article was light on details, but reported the most important development
to CNN: Judge Aileen Cannon canceled the current trial date — without setting a new one — since she’s facing eight substantial new motions she has yet to rule on. To give you an idea how substantial, one of the motions is scheduled for a
three-day hearing.
But the issue of FBI evidence tampering might have been the most interesting out of a raft of very interesting Trump team issues. Do you remember
this widely-circulated picture?
The photo — unimaginably leaked by the DOJ — was one of the pictures allegedly taken by the FBI during the Mar-a-Lago raid. Many observers, including me, opined it looked like FBI drama queens had deliberately staged the documents, dramatically spreading them out on the floor,
intending to manufacture a media picture for later leaking.
Either way, that picture did the job. On August 31, 2022, for example, Washington Post fact checker Philip Bump explained to readers that 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.”
It turns out those of us who smelled an FBI rat were right, as the government has recently been reluctantly forced to admit. At least, we were right that the documents were not originally found on Trump’s office floor. Rather, they were neatly stored in secured bankers’ boxes. The FBI altered the evidence by throwing it all over the floor helter-skelter, putting stupid tape measures under it to look official, and adding a silly evidence tag (“2A”), like they were marking the location where the fatal bullet casing was found.
But it turns out it was
so much worse. Thanks to heroic work by Trump’s lawyers, and following several stern orders from Judge Cannon forcing the government to respond to basic discovery requests, we’ve now learned that the documents in the picture
aren’t even the documents in the picture.
What I mean is, the FBI has now admitted that the documents seen splayed on the floor are
dummies, props. At the time the picture was taken, the original classified documents had already been secured and removed. So the FBI took some other random papers and — get this —
put classified cover sheets on them and then posed those dummy documents on the floor. Picture time.
Not only weren’t the documents found on the floor, and not only weren’t the documents in the picture the actual documents, but the official-looking classified document cover sheets as seen in the photo were totally fake. There were no classified cover sheets on any of the original documents. It was all made up. Here’s how the government warily tried to explain the operation in one of its recent filings:
“[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.”
And now, they’ve even lost track of at least some of the documents and their fabricated placeholders. The government carefully admitted:
“In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet.”
“In many instances.”
But not all. Worse for the government, over the last year or so, its lawyers have
repeatedly insisted that the bankers’ boxes were preserved
exactly in their original conditions. But the government’s latest filings and admissions indicate those repeated representations to the court were
false.
It’s not a mere technicality. Trump’s lawyers have offered various legitimate reasons why the FBI’s poor handling of the evidence has fatally compromised the case. For one thing, they’d intended to show that everything in the boxes had been packed in
sequential date order, proving the documents were undisturbed from when the National Archives staff originally packed them
for Trump to take with him.
But now the documents are all mixed up, not even in the same bankers’ boxes in which they began. Nobody knows anymore.
So the government now faces two new, potentially fatal problems: the evidence tampering (or at least, evidence negligence), and lying to the court. And the CNN article mentioned, this is just
one of the many complex and potentially novel issues now confronting the government’s case.
Stormy spins sex stories; classified docs judge cans trial; jabmaker pulls product after clot reveal; Moderna admits millions of injuries; Boy Scouts rename to Woke Scouts; a tale of two tanks; more.
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