It's time to start asking some hard questions about Donald Trump's mass mishandling of classified documents and keeping them at Mar-a-Lago, a known hotbed of international espionage, and how much damage was done to America's national security. The Washington Post's White House team gives us a pretty good report on what went down in 2021 and 2022.
For the 15 boxes of documents — some classified and marked “top secret” — the long journey from former president Donald Trump’s gilded Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Fla., to a secure facility in the Washington area began last summer, when the National Archives and Records Administration contacted Trump’s team to alert it that some high-profile documents from his presidency appeared to be missing.
But it was not until the end of the year that the boxes were finally readied for collection, according to two people familiar with the logistics, one of whom described the ordeal as “a bit of a process.”
At one point, Archives officials threatened that if Trump’s team did not voluntarily produce the materials, they would send a letter to Congress or the Justice Department revealing the lack of cooperation, according to a third person familiar with the situation.
“At first it was unclear what he was going to give back and when,” said one of these people, who, like the others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid details of a sensitive situation.
Trump was noticeably secretive about the packing process, and top aides and longtime administrative staffers did not see the contents, the people said.
Finally, on Jan. 17, a contractor dispatched by the Archives arrived at Mar-a-Lago to load the boxes into a truck and transport them a thousand miles north, eventually landing at a sensitive compartmented information facility — known as a SCIF — in the greater Washington area. Trump’s assistant had been looped in on the emails handling the logistics, and both Trump’s team and the National Archives described the in-person handover as amicable. Trump said in a statement it was “without conflict” and “very friendly.”
“This unfortunate attempt by the media to twist a story, along with the help of anonymous sources, is just another sensationalized distraction of an otherwise uneventful effort to persevere the legacy of President Trump and a good faith effort to ensure the fulfillment of the Presidential Records Act,” Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich said in a statement Saturday. “Sadly, the business of ‘news’ has become reliant on the next manufactured Trump ‘investigation,’ and so here we are. It’s a disgrace.”
The tale of these 15 boxes — and the material contained within — underscores how defiantly and indiscriminately Trump violated the records law, which requires that the White House preserve all written communication related to a president’s official duties and then turn it over to the National Archives. Instead, starting in his presidency and continuing into his post-presidency, documents both classified and mundane — as well as official gifts, which are governed by similarly stringent rules — were treated with the same disregard and enveloped in the same chaos that characterized his term in office.
A trucking administrator at Bennett, a Georgia transportation firm that handles a lot of government contracts, said that under traditional circumstances, shipment of these sorts of materials would be handled through a secure transfer — including GPS tracking of the vehicle and a team trained to handle sensitive information.
But it remains unclear what protocols were followed because, as one person familiar with the transfer said, “Nothing about this is normal.” Officials have not identified what company handled the Mar-a-Lago shipment.
“He would roll his eyes at the rules, so we did, too,” said Stephanie Grisham, the former Trump White House press secretary who has become an outspoken Trump critic since the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. “We weren’t going to get in trouble because he’s the president of the United States.”
Grisham, the author of “I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House,” recalled one instance in which she expressed concern about violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in some forms of political activity. Grisham said that Trump told her: “Who’s the boss of the Hatch Act? It’s me. So say whatever you want.”
That cavalier attitude about the rules extended to Trump’s treatment of documents, which he routinely ripped up and threw away, forcing aides to retrieve them and send them to the White House Office of Records Management to be taped back together to comply with the Presidential Records Act, which dates to 1978.
Trump had a ripping process so distinctive that several aides instantly recalled it — two large, clean tears that left paper in quarters — and the remnants were strewn on desks, in trash cans and on floors, from the Oval Office to Air Force One. As president, Trump also regularly retired to his private residence with reams of official documents, often leaving them to pile up until records staff came searching for them.
When the Archives sent a tranche of documents to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, some of them had been ripped up and taped back together. And some no longer existed at all; when the committee requested certain documents focused on Trump’s campaign to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election results, some of the relevant materials had already been shredded, according to a former senior administration official.
A forthcoming book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman also reports that while Trump was president, White House residence staff members from time to time found clumps of paper clogging a toilet, leading them to believe that Trump was flushing documents.
Trump was warned by his first two chiefs of staff — Reince Priebus and John F. Kelly — about complying with the records act, as well as by Donald McGahn, his White House counsel.
And in 2020, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) ripped up a copy of Trump’s State of the Union address after he delivered it, Trump seemed to exhibit at least some awareness of the Presidential Records Act, incorrectly claiming Pelosi had committed a crime.
“I thought it was a terrible thing when she ripped up the speech,” Trump said at the time. “First of all, it’s an official document. You’re not allowed. It’s illegal what she did. She broke the law.”
This past week, The Washington Post reported that Archives officials — suspecting that Trump may have violated laws dealing with the handling of government documents — asked the Justice Department to examine the issue. It is unclear whether the department will launch a full investigation, but the query prompted discussions between federal law enforcement officials about whether they should investigate Trump for a possible crime, though such a prosecution would face a high legal bar.
Trump’s haphazard treatment of documents, including sensitive ones, continued throughout his administration, right up until his frenzied and begrudging departure.
So another field of criminality that Merrick Garland will almost certainly ignore. The Justice Department has been asked to investigate a number of Trump crimes: the Old Post Office Building lease, profiting from being in office, campaign finance crimes, the inauguration and its funding, now this.
No charges.
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