When Donald Trump was indicted last year for pilfering reams of classified documents from the White House after he was voted out of office, court filings included photos of U.S. government secrets stashed arbitrarily throughout the former president’s country-club-turned-residence: in, among other unsecured spaces, a ballroom, a bathroom, and Trump’s bedroom.
On Monday night, following Trump’s latest disingenuous contention—that the FBI agents who seized and reviewed the contents of boxes upon boxes of sensitive materials stored at Mar-a-Lago “failed to maintain” the exact order of the documents within, which Trump now claims could somehow exonerate him—government lawyers filed a scathing response letting the air out of the presumptive GOP presidential nominee’s contentions.
Far from a neatly ordered system under which Trump, a notorious pack rat, maintained a precise inventory of important documents, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, along with prosecutors Jay Bratt and David Harbach, noted the “cluttered collection of keepsakes,” which “traveled from one readily accessible location to another” around the Palm Beach, Florida club.
“[T]his is not a case where reams of identically-sized documents were stacked neatly in file folders or redwelds, arrayed perfectly within a box,” the filing states. “To anyone other than Trump, the boxes had no apparent organization whatsoever.”
Trump kept highly guarded secrets in boxes with “personally chosen keepsakes of various sizes and shapes from his presidency—newspapers, thank you notes, Christmas ornaments, magazines, clothing, and photographs of himself and others,” the government’s filing goes on.
“After they landed in stacks in the storage room, several boxes fell and splayed their contents on the floor; and boxes were moved to Trump’s residence on more than one occasion so he could review and pick through them,” the filing continues. “Against this backdrop of the haphazard manner in which Trump chose to maintain his boxes, he now claims that the precise order of the items within the boxes when they left the White House was critical to his defense, and, what’s more, that FBI agents executing the search warrant in August 2022 should have known that.”
Smith, Bratt, and Harbach included a slew of exhibits to back up their position, with numerous previously unseen pictures of Trump’s decidedly chaotic storage methods. One shows sweaty, balled-up golf shirts side-by-side with a folder marked “CONFIDENTIAL.” Another shows extremely sensitive defense-related documents carelessly stacked up on the floor beside cases of Diet Coke, an Hermes tie box, and a “Save America” cap, several toppled boxes with papers, binders, and folders spilling out, and a box containing a Christmas pillow and a random length of bubble wrap, beneath which, as national security analyst and writer Marcy Wheeler pointed out, at least one document prosecutors say was related to America’s nuclear weapons program.
In one exhibit, Smith & Co. provide a new photo of a storage closet at Mar-a-Lago where the contents of at least five upturned bankers boxes can be seen spilling out onto the floor. Several suit jackets in plastic dry cleaning bags hang from a rack above them, a Gibson guitar case leans against the wall, and what appears to be a piece of rococo plaster moulding teeters atop a cardboard box nearby. According to the indictment, one of the boxes seen here contained a 2019 document marked “SECRET//REL TO USA, FVEY,” which denotes the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the U.S.
In another, a picture taken by FBI agents on the Mar-a-Lago search team shows a blue leather-bound box, filled to overflowing, sitting on the carpeted floor of Trump’s home office next to a supply of Trump’s favorite soft drink. Nearby, a small portrait of Trump, making his trademark “resolute” face, is visible against a wall. Inside this box, according to prosecutors, were three documents classified at the Top Secret level.
A third exhibit shows a series of three boxes in a Mar-a-Lago storage room, one containing a pile of dirty clothes, another with a document marked “SECRET,” and one with a small red-and-white-trimmed pillow and a sheet of pink plastic bubble wrap on top. This box held 10 documents for which Trump was charged, including one classified as “Formerly Restricted under the Atomic Energy Act, meaning it pertains to US nuclear weapons,” according to Wheeler. Prosecutors said in Monday night’s filing that the FBI in fact found 32 documents with classification markings, 11 of them “CONFIDENTIAL,” in one binder—though none of them were charged in the indictment.
And in yet another, one of Trump’s boxes can be seen containing a cover sheet marked “SECRET,” a binder from a 2018 Cabinet meeting, and, curiously, a copy of a 2019 article in the The New York Times about a whistleblower who exposed Trump’s shady dealings with Deutsche Bank and was later found dead.
On Tuesday afternoon, Smith & Co. were back in court, asking U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to bar Trump from continuing his public attacks on the FBI. Prosecutors say the former president’s penchant for inciting anger and potential violence against agents in the case is a tragedy waiting to happen.
Trump’s attorneys say any restriction on what he can and cannot say is a violation of his constitutional rights.
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