So he could sell them?
So he could auction them off on the international market like one of Melania's more famous hats?
So he could frame them and display them in Mar-a-Lago guest rooms?
This isn’t a man known for his fondness for paperwork. The idea that he told his staff to pack these things up because they hold too much sentimental value for him to part with isn’t going to fly. It’s also not completely clear, from reports, whether all of these top secret documents are ones Trump took with him after leaving office as opposed to, say, the sort of above-top-secret documents the Mar-a-Lago staff might have just found lying around the private club during his time in office and shoveled into a closet because nobody dared to admit finding them.
There are a whole lot of questions remaining here, and most revolve around what else might have gone missing that federal officials might not have gotten back. Officials originally discovered documents were missing because Trump took some of the most iconic documents of his presidency with him; when federal officials couldn't find Trump's letters to the North Korean dictator or his infamous Sharpie-altered hurricane map, it set off some alarms.
That led to Trump's aides returning the aforementioned minor mountain of documents, but the question as to whether they missed any others isn't answerable.
All we know is that Trump's staff did take top secret documents with them, and they were handled with such little care that when the federal archives got them back, the archivists appear to have been caught off guard by what they found. That's not possible unless large parts of the Trump White House were just as contemptuous of records laws and security concerns as he was … but of course they were, and we already knew that.
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