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Julie Kelly's Factual Legal Reporting: Perpetually In Heads of Useful Idiots? Fact check: True


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49 minutes ago, BillsFanNC said:

 

Your honor, the prosecution claimed the alleged crack cocaine my client allegedly possessed was allegedly in his right pants pocket.  Well, it was actually in his left pants pocket.  Therefore, it must have been planted to frame my client.  

 

Judge inserts cat meme:  HUH!  HUH!

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                                            c72b19e0-6336-4792-8ee9-1c30faeb301b_630

 

It is the picture that launched a thousand pearl-clutching articles.

 

A few weeks after the armed FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, the Department of Justice released a stunning photograph depicting alleged contraband seized from Donald Trump’s Palm Beach estate that day; the image showed colored sheets representing scary classification levels attached to files purportedly discovered in Trump’s private office.

 

Included as a government exhibit to oppose Trump’s lawsuit requesting a special master to vet the 13,000 items taken from his residence, the crime scene pic immediately went viral—just as Attorney General Merrick Garland, who authorized the unprecedented raid, intended. 

 

At the time, even regime-friendly mouthpieces questioned the need and optics of the raid; the photo helped juice the DOJ’s justification for the storming of Trump’s castle.

 

“[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,” Washington Post resident fact checker Philip Bump wrote on August 31, 2022.

 

The New York Times insisted the photo was consistent with how the FBI handles criminal investigations. “[It] is standard practice for the F.B.I. to take evidentiary pictures of materials recovered in a search to ensure that items are properly cataloged and accounted for. Files or documents are not tossed around randomly, even though they might appear that way; they are usually splayed out so they can be separately identified by their markings,” reporters Glenn Thrush and Adam Goldman wrote on August 31, 2022.

 

Except…that is not what happened.

 

A Stunt with Potentially Case-Killing Consequences for DOJ

New court filings in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s espionage and obstruction case against Trump and two co-defendants conclusively demonstrate that the government used the cover sheets to deceive the public as well as the court. The photo was a stunt, and one that adds more fuel to this dumpster-fire case.

 

Jay Bratt, who was the lead DOJ prosecutor on the investigation at the time and now is assigned to Smith’s team, described the photo this way in his August 30, 2022 response to Trump’s special master lawsuit:

 

“[Thirteen] boxes or containers contained documents with classification markings, and in all, over one hundred unique documents with classification markings…were seized. Certain of the documents had colored cover sheets indicating their classification status. (Emphasis added.) See, e.g., Attachment F (redacted FBI photograph of certain documents and classified cover sheets recovered from a container in the ‘45 office’).”

 

The DOJ’s clever wordsmithing, however, did not accurately describe the origin of the cover sheets. In what must be considered not only an act of doctoring evidence but willfully misleading the American people into believing the former president is a criminal and threat to national security, agents involved in the raid attached the cover sheets to at least seven files to stage the photo.

 

https://www.declassified.live/p/the-dojs-doctored-crime-scene-photo

 

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14 hours ago, daz28 said:

Your honor, the prosecution claimed the alleged crack cocaine my client allegedly possessed was allegedly in his right pants pocket.  Well, it was actually in his left pants pocket.  Therefore, it must have been planted to frame my client.  

 

Judge inserts cat meme:  HUH!  HUH!

The actions of the investigators, the details and professionalism of the investigation have always been relevant to criminal trials.  That’s nothing new, and critique of errors/wrongdoing is absolutely part of the dialogue. 
 

In this case, a better analogy is “this photograph of the defendant with crack cocaine in his pocket, released to the media, is not reflective of the scene. Sorry.   AOC, and representations we made to the court about processes we followed, some of that was made up.  We’re really sorry about that, too.”.

 

 

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2 minutes ago, leh-nerd skin-erd said:

The actions of the investigators, the details and professionalism of the investigation have always been relevant to criminal trials.  That’s nothing new, and critique of errors/wrongdoing is absolutely part of the dialogue. 
 

In this case, a better analogy is “this photograph of the defendant with crack cocaine in his pocket, released to the media, is not reflective of the scene. Sorry.   AOC, and representations we made to the court about processes we followed, some of that was made up.  We’re really sorry about that, too.”.

 

 


Foh

 

 

 

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