Props Department

The FBI may have planted props:

Recent court disclosures give two indications that federal employees could have planted the classified documents used to mire Trump and several aides into a sprawling investigation and an election-interfering court case. The first is the explosive evidence revealed Friday: For 11 months, the special counsel’s office hid that it misplaced some — we don’t know how many or which — of the same allegedly classified documents it claims Trump criminally possessed at Mar-a-Lago. In that news-dump-timed filing Friday afternoon, the special counsel’s office revealed that when federal agents took boxes of papers from Trump’s home in an unprecedented FBI raid, they took out what they thought might be classified documents the president allegedly was not allowed to possess. They say they marked these documents’ original location in the boxes with “placeholder” sheets of paper marked for an inventory. Yet after these boxes were removed to the FBI’s Washington field office for further inspection, the special counsel says, they discovered the boxes were not in the same state as when they were seized at Mar-a-Lago. When attempting to piece the boxes back together, the special counsel’s office said, “In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet” (emphasis added). The filing also says the FBI “generally” inserted the “handwritten sheets,” indicating there were exceptions to its use of placeholders to indicate the allegedly original locations of allegedly classified documents Trump allegedly criminally possessed. In a footnote, the special counsel writes that this situation is “inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court.” In other words, the special counsel has been lying to the court, the public, and the Trump legal team this whole time about the evidence grounding its entire case.

They just wanted to be "careful..."