Special counsel Jack Smith’s team made a startling admission in its case against former President Donald Trump, acknowledging in a new court filing that it failed to turn over all evidence to Mr. Trump’s legal team as required by law and falsely claimed that it had.
Mr. Smith’s team said in a July 31 court filing (pdf) in its classified documents case against the former president that it had incorrectly claimed during a July 18 court hearing that it had provided all Mar-a-Lago surveillance footage to Mr. Trump’s defense attorneys, as required by law.
“On July 27, as part of the preparation for the superseding indictment coming later that day and the discovery production for Defendant De Oliveira, the Government learned that this footage had not been processed and uploaded to the platform established for the defense to view the subpoenaed footage,” Mr. Smith’s team wrote in the July 31 filing.
“The Government’s representation at the July 18 hearing that all surveillance footage the Government had obtained pre-indictment had been produced was therefore incorrect.”
Under what is called the Brady rule, prosecutors in a criminal trial have a constitutional duty to disclose all evidence to a defendant’s legal team, including information that is favorable to the accused and could reduce a potential sentence.
Mr. Smith’s team accused Mr. Trump in a new “superseding indictment” (pdf) filed on July 27 of conspiring with his staff to delete some security footage so that the grand jury in the case would not see all the evidence.
The Department of Justice didn’t immediately return a request for comment from The Epoch Times.
Trump Denies Deleting Tapes
In the superseding indictment, the special counsel charged Mr. Trump with willful retention of national defense information and two charges in connection to claims that he allegedly told a Mar-a-Lago worker to delete security tapes to prevent a grand jury from seeing them.
Mar-a-Lago staffer Carlos De Oliveira has been named as a third defendant in the superseding indictment, along with Trump aide Walt Nauta and the former commander-in-chief.
By Tom Ozimek
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