Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team prosecuting Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, alleges that the former president dumped America’s secret files – possibly those with sensitive nuclear information – in a storeroom alongside his diet cokes.
Knewz.com has learned that this allegation was a reaction to one by Trump’s defense in a bid to have the case thrown out of court—they claimed that federal agents rearranged the documents in their storage boxes.
The 30-page document submitted by Smith noted that while Trump seemed to understand the chaotic state of these files, they resembled no apparent order to anyone else.
“Trump personally chose to keep documents containing some of the nation's most highly guarded secrets in cardboard boxes,” the Smith prosecution wrote.
“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.”
“At the end of his presidency, he took his cluttered collection of keepsakes to Mar-a-Lago, his personal residence and social club, where the boxes traveled from one readily accessible location to another—a public ballroom, an office space, a bathroom, and a basement storage area.”
When the federal agents arrived they found these documents “along with a collection of other 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.”
So intense was the disarray that agents had to search the rooms where the documents were stored in the two teams. The first team dubbed the “Privilege Review Team,” tried to ensure that no “potentially attorney-client privileged material was lying around.”
According to national security analyst, Marcy Wheeler, documents pertaining to American nuclear secrets were prone to be part of the chaos.
“If the Filter Team came across any potentially privileged materials, the entire box … was to be segregated away from access by any member of the Case Team,” the prosecution’s filing continued.
If any such material was found, it was “set aside for later, more thorough inspection by filter agents in the Washington Field Office.”
But this did not go according to plan.
“However, once agents saw the state in which Trump kept his boxes,” the filing elaborated, “it became apparent that maintaining the exact order of all documents and items within the boxes was nigh impossible.”
The Smith filing further noted that federal agents were not prepared for the amount of documents they found at Trump’s Florida fiefdom.
It explained that while documents were replaced by “placeholder sheets”, and agents “used pre-printed classified cover sheets for the initial placeholder sheets [...] they ran out of them, having not anticipated finding so many classified documents.”
Despite this legal and logistical challenge, Smith maintains that the investigating “agents did the best they could under the circumstances.”