Jack Smith’s team notified Judge Aileen Cannon’s court–and the Trump team–that court records enumerating the documents found at Donald Trump’s waiting room for Hell in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, may not reflect the actual order of the records as they are now, Politico reports, a minor but important concession by prosecutors.
Prosecutors had previously asserted to the court that the records remained in the order they were found at Mar-a-Lago with the exception that classified records were replaced by placeholder sheets. “The investigative team used classified cover sheets for that purpose, until the FBI ran out because there were so many classified documents, at which point the team began using blank sheets with handwritten notes indicating the classification level of the document(s) seized,” the prosecutors wrote.
But defense attorneys noted that the order of the items in boxes did not list the order in which they were scanned. So why is this a big deal? Well, first, anything that could be used to cause a delay in the Florida documents case will be used to delay it, and Walt Nauta’s lawyers had asked for a continuance to figure out the proper sequence of the documents. And second, Smith’s team noted that while the documents were listed in different sequence, they were still government documents found in Donald Trump’s possession, so the order they were found in doesn’t matter much (paraphrasing).