The federal authorities had staged a “photo op” with the newly disclosed photograph showing documents with classified markings at former President Donald Trump’s Florida resort, alleged ex-White House aide Kash Patel.
The image, captured on Aug. 8 during the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago, showed six documents labeled as “top secret” and several marked as “secret” spread across the carpet in Trump’s home.
“Certain of the documents had colored cover sheets indicating their classification status,” said lawyers for the Justice Department (DOJ) in a brief filed on Aug. 30, in which they urged against granting Trump’s motion for a special master; a neutral outsider who would review the seized Mar-a-Lago materials and sift out potentially privileged documents. The lawyers said that even the FBI counterintelligence personnel and DOJ attorneys reviewing the documents had to request additional clearances to review some of the documents.
But Patel, former chief of staff for the Department of Defense under the Trump administration who has worked at the National Security Council, said that merely seeing the cover sheets amounts to little significance.
“The cover sheets themselves are not classified, even when the cover sheet says top secret,” he added. “It’s a cover sheet. It’s supposed to be on top of documents that are classified, and what the President has publicly contended is that those documents at Mar a Lago were already declassified by him as the president.”
Trump has repeatedly said he declassified the materials he kept, which the federal authorities are disputing.
Patel also suggested that the agents “violated the basic rules of executing a search warrant.” In his days as a federal prosecutor on national security cases, they had handled the documents differently when searching a venue, he said.
“We took photographs of things as they were found,” he said. “Because once you move them, you interfere with the chain of custody, and you interfere with the efficacy of their evidentiary value.”
To him, it is similar to walking into a murder scene, and “finding the gun in the garbage can and one of the murder suspects on the ground,” then putting the gun in the man’s hand and “taking a photo with him pointing it at the person that’s dead.”
“You’re not supposed to do that. It’s literally investigatory 101,” he said.
In the same court filing, the Justice Department argued that Trump lacked the legal standing to ask for a special master because the records belong not to him but to the United States under the Presidential Records Act.
They also said the court lacked jurisdiction to entertain Trump’s claims; and even if it did, appointing a special master was unnecessary, in part, because the government’s filter team has reviewed all the materials and separated anything potentially subject to attorney-client privilege.
“They’re basically telling the judge, we did the work already,” said Patel, adding that the government’s opposition against appointing a special master gives him pause.
“What is the DOJ’s problem and the FBI’s problem with having a special master look at it? What do they have to lose?” he said. “They’re worried about the special master coming in and saying: ‘You guys got it wrong.’”
A court hearing for Trump’s special master request is set for Thursday in West Palm Beach, Florida. The FBI referred The Epoch Times’ inquiries to the DOJ, which didn’t respond to requests for comment by press time.
Source: The Epoch Times