One of those little unexpected perks in life is being able, in our electronic age, to email well known, well regarded experts all over the world and, sometimes, if one is lucky, receive a reply.  This writer has, over the years, exchanged emails with historians, investment bank officers, journalists, legal analysts, (he said, proudly) late former New York City mayor Ed Koch, and others.

It was during one such correspondence, with a well known, well respected attorney and legal analyst, that I posited a problem I saw with the Trump documents case.

I am keeping the analyst's name confidential.  What matters is that this expert agreed that the following analysis does indeed identify a problem.

The problem has to do with the need in any trial to ensure an impartial jury — no easy task in these highly politicized times if the defendant is Donald Trump.  Harvard professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, in a recent article, stated one such problem: Trump was indicted under the Espionage Act, even though the indictment contains no charge of actual espionage.  "Espionage," Dershowitz pointed out, is a highly charged word, evoking images of the most egregious betrayers of America, people like Robert Hanssen and the Rosenbergs — a word, according to Dershowitz, sufficiently prejudicial to a jury as to require the judge to declare a mistrial if the word "espionage" is merely uttered at trial.

But there's another problem, one apparently not identified, at least not publicly, by any expert or journalist.

Can there be any potential juror who has not seen at least one of the following photos?

In these photos we see dozens and dozens of boxes transported from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, filled with classified documents.

Or do we?

"Boxes and boxes of classified documents" was, certainly, this writer's, and surely much, if not most, of the public's impression.  But the actual number of "documents with classified markings" recovered by the FBI is...102.

One hundred two documents.  Total.  Not enough documents to fill one box, let alone the many boxes in the above photos.

Surely, the FBI could have consolidated these 102 documents into a single box and photographed — and leaked — only that box.  Or dispensed with a box entirely and simply stacked and photographed the documents on a table.

Here is Senator Rand Paul standing behind the 2022 omnibus spending bill:

Sen. Rand Paul, Twitter.

Some — heck, all may be long, but not that long.

Here's a more reasonable idea of what 102 classified documents looks like:

Photo by Mediamodifier on Unsplash.

So what's with all those boxes?  The purpose, obviously, is for a corrupt, politicized FBI and Justice Department to create a false impression in the mind of the public, to make Trump's possession of 102 questioned documents appear much worse than it actually was.

This writer's question to the legal expert was whether the sight of all these boxes and the misleading impression they create — were intended to create — could prejudice a jury.

The expert's answer: yes, it could.

The task, then, for both sides' attorneys, but especially the prosecution, is to find enough people who have not seen the FBI photos to assemble an impartial jury.

Good luck with that.

Gene Schwimmer is the proprietor of Gene's Geopolitical Thought of the Day on YouTube and Rumble.