Seized “government documents were ‘likely concealed and removed’ from a storage room at Mar-a-Lago as part of an effort to ‘obstruct’ the FBI’s investigation into … Trump’s potential mishandling of classified materials, the Justice Department said in a blockbuster court filing Tuesday night,” CNN reported on August 30, 2022 (see story here).
It’s already known that Trump refused to hand over the documents for over a year, and DoJ resorted to the Aug. 8 search only after requests, negotiations, and a grand jury subpoena had failed to produce the materials. After an initial handover of 15 boxes in January 2022, Trump’s lawyers also falsely represented that no more classified materials were at Mar-a-Lago. In fact, over twice as many classified documents were still there.
Huffington Post says (here), “Prosecutors told a federal judge late Tuesday that … Trump and his team repeatedly failed to hand over classified documents, and that efforts to keep them at his Mar-a-Lago home constituted obstruction of its criminal investigation. Prosecutors went into a detailed chronology of the … efforts to get the documents back” and wrote in a 36-page brief opposing Trump’s demand for a special master that “government records were likely concealed and removed from the Storage Room and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation.”
“Notwithstanding counsel’s representation on June 3, 2022, that materials from the White House were only located in the storage room, classified documents were found in both the storage room and in the former president’s office,” the brief says, including Trump’s desk drawer where his passports were found. Prosecutors also released a photo (below; how to interpret photo here) of some of the seized documents.
Trump has responded to the latest developments by demanding to immediately be reinstated to the presidency and ramping up his verbal attacks on the FBI while, as Huffington Post notes, “His followers have responded by threatening FBI agents and the Department of Justice.” Most Republican politicians have either criticized the search or kept quiet about Trump’s behavior and the threats against the FBI and magistrate judge who authorized the search warrant.
