‘It worried people all the time': How Trump’s handling of secret documents led to the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search
Former President Donald Trump's cavalier approach to sensitive documents led to the FBI investigation and search of his Mar-a-Lago estate, sources say.
When it finally dawned on Donald Trump in the twilight of his presidency that he wouldn’t be living at the White House for another four years, he had a problem: He had barely packed and had to move out quickly.
West Wing aides and government movers frantically tossed documents and other items into banker boxes that were shipped to a storage room at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida along with other, previously packed records set aside by Trump, sometimes erratically so, according to two sources with knowledge of Trump’s move and records issues.
There, in that Mar-a-Lago room, some of the boxes contained documents with sensitive materials that the federal government appears to consider so important to national security that FBI agents Monday took the unprecedented step of executing a search warrant at the home of a former president to seize them. The records comprised 11 sets of classified documents, including some that were labeled secret and top secret, according to a property receipt from the search.
Trump’s style of handling White House documents has been described by people who worked for him as slapdash and ad hoc, contributing to the debacle he now faces. He was known to rip up records that aides would have to retrieve from trash cans or from the floor and tape back together, according to former aides and multiple reports.
Trump says he declassified Mar-a-Lago documents found by FBIAug. 13, 202202:09“It worried people all the time,” John Bolton, one of Trump’s former national security advisers, recalled in an interview.
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