Months after the FBI got a warrant and searched Mar-a-Lago, looking for classified documents Donald Trump was refusing to return to the government, more classified documents turned up at Mar-a-Lago. How did that happen?
CNN dives into that question, and the answer is not that the FBI just missed a box in August. Instead, the box containing some classified documents mixed in with presidential schedules from Trump’s time in the White House had been at Mar-a-Lago, then was moved off-site to Trump’s official "office of the former president" in Palm Beach, then was moved back to Mar-a-Lago, where the documents were identified when Trump hired people to search additional properties and then, under pressure from the Justice Department, extended that to another search of Mar-a-Lago. Got all that?
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It looks pretty prescient of the Justice Department to have told Trump’s team to search Mar-a-Lago again along with the search of his Bedminster golf club, Trump Tower, the Palm Beach office, and a Florida storage unit. At least two documents marked classified were found at the storage unit.
CNN tracks out what happened with the box that was, then wasn’t, then was at Mar-a-Lago. A low-level Trump aide was told to scan the presidential schedules in the box. Since there was no scanner available (it is possible to get a scanner for around $100), the aide installed an app on her phone and scanned the documents that way. As she scanned thousands of pages that way, she didn’t notice classified markings on some of the documents. Presumably when you’re using your phone to scan thousands of pages, your eyes glaze over at a certain point. It’s understandable. Once scanned, the documents were uploaded to a Trump-owned laptop.
After the documents in the box had all been scanned, in November 2021, the box was taken to the Palm Beach office, where it remained for about a year, including through the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. When Trump came back to Mar-a-Lago in the fall after spending the summer in New Jersey, the box was brought back to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago office.
In November 2022, Trump’s lawyers searched those four non-Mar-a-Lago locations and promised in writing that this time they really did look and return everything they found, but the Justice Department pressed for that one more Mar-a-Lago search, and hey, what do you know, more documents.
It bears remembering, when we think about Trump’s lawyers putting in writing that they had searched and returned everything they found, that this was not the first time that happened. In June 2022, Trump’s lawyers returned 30 classified documents to the government, along with a statement that a “diligent search” of Mar-a-Lago had been conducted and that no more classified documents had been found. The second part of that was massively false—when the FBI searched, it found more than 100 documents with classified markings—which throws the “diligent search” claim under suspicion. Maybe by November and December, Trump’s lawyers understood that he was in enough legal jeopardy that it would be a good idea to stop jerking the Justice Department around. But that’s a maybe. I am not a lawyer, but I can’t help thinking that if I were on the special counsel’s team, I would want the FBI to search every property connected to Trump. And I would want those searches to happen at the same time, so that a set of documents that was in Place B when Place A was searched didn’t end up in Place A when Place B was searched.
We still don’t know why Donald Trump took all those classified documents and refused to give them back. It could have just been a combination of his toxic personality traits and belief that his authority supersedes everything else—that to him, the documents were and always would be his and it was a personal affront for the government to say “No they’re not” and tell him to give them back. We do know, after all, that Donald Trump thinks and has always thought that his personal interests rank above those of the United States of America. That’s a bad enough set of reasons. But it could easily be something worse, considering that we are talking about someone who is getting millions of dollars from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and has in general shown himself to be for sale to the highest bidder, in addition to his fanboy demeanor around the authoritarian leaders of the world.
The signs are that special counsel Jack Smith is taking this part of his investigation seriously, though the investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election is higher profile. Maybe, maybe, possibly someday Trump will face some kind of … maybe not justice, but at least consequences for his actions.
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