I think the Trump team, when they said “There are no photographs or logs documenting the nature in which the allegedly classified documents were commingled with personal effects..." and "the evidence ”was materially exculpatory,” was alleging that the fact that documents marked classified were packed along with personal items means that President Trump had declassified those documents according to the Presidential Records Act and had them stored along with his other personal effects.
By changing the order of documents and potentially moving classified documents to boxes that contained no personal effects because they didn't know which documents went with which placeholders, the exculpatory nature of commingled documents is no longer there.
-PJ
That makes sense.
Any way you slice it, their bungling of the evidence renders it inadmissible because of the exculpatory evidence that was lost AND because the chain of custody for individual documents has not been documented and certified.
I would think these are “mistakes” that entry-level investigators would not even make. Seems almost as if they were deliberate and necessary because they planted the “evidence” themselves.