Special counsel Jack Smith and his team were recently forced to inform a federal court late last week that they did not turn over all evidence to former President Donald Trump’s legal team, though they previously claimed they had done so.
Newsweek reported in a court filing on July 31 that Smith’s team acknowledged that they had not uploaded video footage taken from the FBI’s raid a year ago at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate to an online platform, as required by law, for Trump’s defense team to review.
The Justice Department ordered the raid to recover classified documents that Trump has said he declassified before leaving the White House.
“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,” read the 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,” the filing continued.
Under a legal doctrine known as the Brady Rule, prosecutors are required to provide defense lawyers with any exculpatory evidence they find that can be used in court.
The rule stems from a 1963 Supreme Court ruling in Brady v. Maryland and says, “Suppression by the prosecution of evidence favorable to an accused who has requested it violates due process where the evidence is material either to guilt or to punishment, irrespective of the good faith or bad faith of the prosecution
Smith’s team acknowledged as much in its filing last week. “The Government is aware of its continuing duty to disclose such newly discovered additional information,” it said.
Prosecutors discovered that video used as evidence “had not been processed and uploaded to the platform established for the defense to view” when they were getting ready to indict Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira last week for allegedly conspiring with Trump to delete surveillance footage from the estate, Smith’s team wrote in a filing.
