But they did find something. Lots of somethings.
FBI Search and Seizure at Trump's Mar-A-Lago Residence, August 8, 2022, Case Dismissed July 15, 2024
Is this an admission that they (TrumpCo) specifically moved items to the secret rooms so that the FBI couldn’t find it?
I don’t know if it would go that far since what they’re saying is "we didn’t have anything and you knew it, so you purposely ‘forgot’ to search the entire house so you could imply to the jury ‘the stuff they shouldn’t have is probably in that room’.
I’m going to take a stab at and say that what they’re trying to argue is if the FBI knew about the hidden rooms and didn’t search them then:
- They were not that interested in getting the documents back.
- They cannot then say that Trump still had documents after the search.
(Please do not beat me up… I’m only try to parse the Trumpian “logic”)
This is like a serial killer saying that they are innocent because the cops didn’t dig up the 8th shallow grave. It makes zero sense at all.
Yes, it makes zero sense.
But, here’s a modest prediction: Aileen Cannon will, against all odds, entertain it and permit its use as a delaying tactic.
Curse you for making me read that… but this was interesting. They can’t watch their own CCTV footage that was confiscated.
Defendants requested in their Motion that the Court compel the SCO to produce the
roughly 80 terabytes of CCTV footage in a manner that is readily accessible to the defense (ECF
No. 262 56-63). Defendants explained the technical difficulties they have encountered in
attempting to review the video footage, including exceptionally slow file decompression,
complications attempting to use the proprietary player that is needed to view the video, and files
that fail to play after decompression.
I’m sorry but I have to laugh a bit. Not just at the defense being incompetent but also because I can relate. I have quite a number of investigators I work with at my agency, and as their IT guy I’m often helping my investigators try to review CCTV footage that they’ve received as part of their investigations, and I’ve run into every one of those issues before.
Now, what’s different here is of course this is Trump’s own system. It’s one thing when you are struggling with some random unfamiliar setup that came from who knows where, it’s another when it’s your own. It sounds to me like the prosecution has taken that footage and managed to use software to produce clear and easy-to-view video files from it, to use as evidence in the trial. The defense wants the prosecution to share it because they can’t figure it out.
To put it in non-IT terms, imagine you are a defense attorney and one piece of evidence is a notebook that your client wrote in. The prosecution has transcribed the notebook into a typed format, printed out neatly for easy readability. You ask the prosecution for a copy of that because none of you can read the original notebook (including the defendant who wrote it).
If those materials will be used in court (the fixed footage or typed transcript) are you required to give the other side a copy?
IANAL so I don’t know, but such a thing seems reasonable; the defendant is entitled to a fair trial and so the defense should have a right to review it.
It just doesn’t make the defense look particularly competent, that’s all.
I have to laugh a bit. The original text from that link was not copy/pasteable, so I right clicked and some new option in Chrome “Open in reading mode” allowed me to. Maybe they should try right clicking.
I was thinking the exact same thing. It appears that the incompetence of Trump’s lawyers extends to their IT team as well.
Highly paid IT team, I’m sure. 
To use a different example, if I’m the prosecutor and defense gives me a table of statistics as part of their evidence, when I plot those points on a graph to use as a visual aid, do I need to give the defense a copy?
It’s their data to begin with, I just made it easier to understand. But I also don’t know what’s considered ‘evidence’ in this setting.
This is my take on it, with the standard IANAL disclaimer. I feel like they are requesting a large amount of discovery so they can look for something that isn’t there. But because they need to search every government document that ever mentioned Mar-a-Lago, they’re going to need 15-20 years to make sure. They may also be simultaneously arguing that since this is proof that the government lied, the whole case should be thrown out. They will accept either answer as correct.
Again, I dunno, but I think that if it’s being used as evidence in the trial, the defense has a right to review it. One of the things I picked up from watching videos about how trials actually work in American law is that the idea of a sudden piece of evidence being introduced as a surprise in a trial that the defense wasn’t expecting is a thing of fiction. Evidence has to be admitted in a formal manner and the defense needs to have a reasonable amount of time to review it themselves. (Something that has been cited as reasons for delay in this particular documents case before.)
I bet the “IT team” Yuscil Taveras’s “cooperation agreement” doesn’t allow him to help out.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/06/politics/mar-a-lago-it-worker/index.html
I know nothing about the law, so I’ll ask our resident lawyerly-type people (like @Dinsdale and @Moriarty) to weigh in on this.
According to Politico, Jack Smith has admitted that some of the files and boxes taken from Mar-A-Lago were inadvertently jumbled and reordered.
The Right-wing twitterati is claiming that this is evidence tampering, and that Smith should face prosecution for this.
How big a deal is something like this in practical terms? Is this a fairly significant issue, or is this just another example of things being blown way out of proportion because it has Trump’s name attached to it?
My proceedings have greatly relaxed rules of evidence, so I’ll leave it to those with (considerable) experience.
I’m not sure how such “mishandling” would constitute evidence tampering, so long as all of the material remained. I could imagine it might be relevant to some possible uses of the evidence, if the arrangement of the material was critical to the specific facts attempted to be proven.
But I’ll stop trying to talk like a lawyer before I embarrass myself further.
You are in the judicial field, though, correct? I thought you were a judge. Apologies if I was thinking of someone else.