This one should have been obvious, but was so devious that I missed it. I bet you did too.
The indictment says that Trump’s alleged illegal conduct related to 102 classified documents. What you see above are four of six photos the Justice Department included in the indictment, apparently showing Trumps trove of stolen government materials. I don’t know how large the documents were, but assuming that those photos weren’t staged, they must have been taken before the boxes were examined. I’ll believe they contained paper (unlike the very similar piles of boxes in three of the rooms in my home, which also contain, for example, dinosaur models), but it is wildly unlikely that the boxes contain just 102 classified documents.
Never mind: that’s how all of the news sources presented them, and that is why the Justice Department probably included the photos: to poison public opinion against the former President. Poisoning public opinion is also poisoning the jury pool, and as we know, much of the public doesn’t have to be metaphorically poisoned. I realized this open deceit as I read my Facebook friends’ comments mocking the photos as proving how flagrant Trump’s “crime” was. The photos, in fact, prove nothing, except this: 1) the Justice Department lawyers who prepared the indictment violated the ethics rules and 2) it worked, because so many Americans want to believe that Trump is guilty.
Ethics Alarms 