>Smith’s team revealed in the filing that FBI agents carried printed “classified cover sheets” during the Aug. 8, 2022, search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and used them to replace any classified documents they discovered in cardboard Bankers Boxes that littered the former president’s residence.
Because you don't want a direct photo of a top-secret document laying around, they cover it and document it as such.
(There were even so many to cover they had to make extras, which because they were hand-made, didn't get removed as is apparently the norm during processing.)
> “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.
> “Any handwritten sheets that currently remain in the boxes do not represent additional classified documents — they were just not removed when the classified cover sheets with the index code were added,” Smith’s team wrote. “In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet.”
The point is that putting a "TOP SECRET" cover sheet on a TOP SECRET document doesn't change the status of what's underneath that cover sheet.
They didn't bring a bunch of "TOP SECRET" cover sheets to sprinkle on random unclassified docs to make it look more illegal than it was. They weren't "regular papers"; they were classified documents.
> It was regular papers before and made to look super illegal in the photo
it was "regular papers before" does not match with the evidence regarding the large amount of classified documents found, that had to be covered with coversheets so that classified information would not be leaked.
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.
it seems these cover sheets were used to cover the _actual_ classified information so that the photographs were not leaking info.
are you suggesting that since the FBI covered the actual classified docs at Mar-a-Lago with coversheets that should have negated the entire thing?
>Smith’s team revealed in the filing that FBI agents carried printed “classified cover sheets” during the Aug. 8, 2022, search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and used them to replace any classified documents they discovered in cardboard Bankers Boxes that littered the former president’s residence.