A new court filing adds more detail to how officials became concerned that the 15 boxes handed over by the former president in January weren’t the full picture.
(Bloomberg) — It was supposed to be a bureaucratic transfer of records from a former president to the nation’s archives. But like much of Donald Trump’s administration, it was anything but ordinary.A filing from the Justice Department on the search of his Florida estate confirmed the long-standing rumors of haphazard practices.
Officials laid out in detail this week how highly classified documents were kept by the former president at Mar-a-Lago including a photo that went viral showing blurred-out, secret documents arranged on floral carpet, next to a cardboard Bankers Box with keepsakes like a framed Time magazine cover.
The filing marks a high-profile back-and-forth between Trump’s lawyers and the government, highlighting how routine document requests from the National Archives and Records Administration have spiraled into an aggressive response from the Justice Department against a former president.
“It would have been an unusual circumstance for NARA staff to have to make repeated inquiries as to missing presidential records,” said Jason R. Baron, a former NARA litigation director. “I suspect that the staff were asking legitimate questions based both on their knowledge that specific documents appeared to be missing, and their concern regarding reports of past document shredding at the White House.’’
Trump has denied wrongdoing, but has offered no credible explanation for why he had the documents or didn’t return them earlier, as his lawyers claimed. Trump has also taken to his social media platform, Truth Social, to argue they were declassified, although officials have said in court filings that Trump never indicated they were — nor did this week’s photo show that some markings had been crossed out.
The document caper started the year Trump left office in January 2021. NARA, responsible for preserving all sorts of official documents, had “ongoing communications,” although tense, with Trump’s representatives after the agency “perceived” records were missing and asked they be handed over, according to Tuesday’s court filing.
Former US archivists say the agency keeps so much material that it’s unlikely the discovery that records were missing came easily, like a librarian tallying overdue books. The volume of data alone from any modern presidential administration, one said, could account for petabytes of information — roughly the data stored on hundreds of laptops — and thousands of physical boxes.
This wasn’t the way it normally works.“First, you write to the head of the agency and ask for documents that haven’t been turned over, and pick a time frame — maybe 30 days. That’s the way it begins,” said Trudy Huskamp Peterson, a former acting NARA archivist, of the archives’ normal process for retrieving documents from recalcitrant bureaucrats. “The only recourse you really have, frankly, is to reach out to the president if you’re in the Executive Branch. I suppose you could, but that seems like a stretch. Or, you could report to the Congress that this agency is being a bad boy and they’re not turning over what they’re supposed to do in the right time. But that isn’t going to win you any points, either. So what you continue to do is to continue to negotiate.”
“If NARA staff weren’t getting good answers, they would certainly have made further inquiries, which in this case led to the return of the original 15 boxes,” Baron said, who speculated the initial tip that there was “additional material” at Mar-a-Lago came from an inside source.
A NARA representative declined to comment on the matter, citing an ongoing investigation.
Trump’s penchant for tearing up documents and overall sloppy record-keeping steered investigators to this dramatic point.
After months of negotiations, Trump turned over 15 boxes of materials in January, detailed in the affidavit released recently that was meant to justify the FBI search on Aug. 8. When the archivists examined them, their internal alarm bells went off. “Of most significant concern was that highly classified records were unfoldered, intermixed with other records, and otherwise unproperly identified,” NARA wrote to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The boxes included “a lot of classified records,” mixed in with newspaper clippings, personal records and other unimportant papers. Some of the “presidential records” had been torn up, which Trump was known to do when he was finished with a paper. But if someone tears up any official document, that violates a federal law that prohibits concealing, removing or “mutilating” documents.
Trump’s laissez-faire manner of handling documents was apparent even before he left the presidency. He would tear up papers to signal a discussion was over, or famously flush notes down the toilet. Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, told Reuters recently that Trump would keep “piles and piles” of documents inside the White House dining room.
By May, court records show, the FBI completed its review of the initial 15 boxes. Inside those, the bureau found dozens of classified documents marked “secret” and 25 labeled “top secret” — the highest classification of information that, if revealed, could cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security. A recent government filing called the document storage “improper” at least four times.
But if messy record-keeping and ripped papers prompted the search, his representatives’ apparent secrecy accelerated the Justice Department’s interest further, court records show.
After their preliminary review of the 15 boxes, the FBI discovered that dozens of additional boxes remained at Mar-a-Lago that “were also likely to contain classified information,” although the government refused to reveal how it knew that. To get them back, a federal grand jury subpoenaed Trump in May; weeks later in June, US officials showed up in south Florida expecting to retrieve more records.
What they saw was another surprise, court records show.
Trump’s representatives provided more classified documents — in an accordion-like Redweld envelope, available at most office supply stores, and secured with double-wrapped tape. The government’s patience with the drip-drip of document recovery from Trump’s team would soon run out.
Federal rules dictate how classified documents should be stored to prevent the wrong people from reading them. They include containers and locks approved by the General Services Administration, or in “vault-type rooms” approved for top secret storage. Classified information can be viewed in a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, which blocks any outside electronic or cellular interference to additionally monitor and control access.
The FBI said a storage room used to hold the documents was off limits to investigators, “giving no opportunity for the government to confirm that no documents with classification markings remained.” That “obstructive conduct,” as the government called it, helped lead to the recent search of Mar-a-Lago and seizure of more than 100 classified records.
Some of the documents they ultimately retrieved were so sensitive that those officials reviewing them had to get even more permission to see them.
“In some instances,” the Justice Department wrote, “even the FBI counterintelligence personnel and DOJ attorneys conducting the review required additional clearances before they were permitted to review certain documents.”
Trump has repeatedly blasted the FBI on his Truth Social platform. He wrote Wednesday: “Terrible the way the FBI, during the Raid of Mar-a-Lago, threw documents haphazardly all over the floor (perhaps pretending it was me that did it!), and then started taking pictures of them for the public to see.”
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