Want to feel old? The FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago was only four months ago. In some ways, this year has flown by, but in other ways, I feel like I’ve aged ten years in 2022. I tapped out of covering the minutiae of Trump’s stolen-classified-documents controversy, but the issue is still absolutely ongoing. On August 9th, the FBI conducted a big raid on Mar-a-Lago and they found many of Trump’s hidden caches of highly classified documents, including the sh-t he hid in the basement. The problem was that the National Archivists know exactly what’s missing from their records, so they know that the FBI hasn’t found all of the sh-t stolen by Trump. Which has led Trump and his team to repeatedly lie to the FBI and DOJ, insisting that Trump doesn’t have any more classified sh-t. Quelle surprise, more stolen documents were just found. To be fair, it looks like these documents were stolen by Trump staffers, not Trump himself.
Lawyers for Donald Trump found at least two items marked classified after an outside team hired by Trump searched a storage unit in West Palm Beach, Fla., used by the former president, according to people familiar with the matter. Those items were immediately turned over to the FBI, according to those people, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
The search was one of at least three searches for classified materials conducted by an outside team at Trump properties in recent weeks, after Trump’s legal team was pressed by a federal judge to attest that it had fully complied with a May grand jury subpoena to turn over all materials bearing classified markings, according to people familiar with the matter.
There has been a lengthy and fierce battle between Trump’s attorneys and the Justice Department in a Washington federal court in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. Much of the legal wrangling remains under seal by a federal judge, but people familiar with the matter say the Justice Department has raised concerns about what prosecutors view as a long-standing failure to fully comply with the May subpoena by Trump’s team.
A person familiar with the matter said the storage unit had a mix of boxes, gifts, suits and clothes, among other things. “It was suits and swords and wrestling belts and all sorts of things,” this person said. “To my knowledge, he has never even been to that storage unit. I don’t think anyone in Trump World could tell you what’s in that storage unit.”
There was no cataloguing of what was put in the storage unit, Trump advisers said — just as there was no cataloguing of what classified documents were taken to a room underneath Mar-a-Lago.
In addition to the storage unit, the team hired an outside company to carry out the search of Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., and, more recently, Trump Tower in New York, according to people familiar with the matter. The outside team also searched at least one other property.
[From WaPo]
To summarize, Trump had to hire a search team to go through all of his properties and storage units in his name and see if there were any more classified docs out there in the wild. The search team found some and immediately turned them over, and it looks like Trump didn’t personally steal those docs (although he’s likely still criminally liable). That being said, I believe DOJ and the National Archives when they say that there are still additional and significant documents missing. We’re like one month away, tops, from Trump claiming that the missing docs are his emotional support classified papers.
The search of Bedminster is interesting, especially because… Trump buried Ivana in a pauper’s grave at the Bedminster golf course. Is DOJ going to get a court order to disinter Ivana and double-check to make sure that Trump didn’t bury a sh-tload of classified docs with his dead ex-wife?
Photos courtesy of Backgrid.
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