UPDATE (Aug. 26, 2022, 12:44 p.m. ET): The Justice Department on Friday unsealed a partially redacted copy of the FBI affidavit used to obtain a search warrant for former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month.
We knew that Donald Trump took classified materials from the White House and brought them to his glorified country club, but we didn’t know how many. It’s against this backdrop that The New York Times published a striking new report that significantly expanded our understanding of what transpired.
The initial batch of documents retrieved by the National Archives from former President Donald J. Trump in January included more than 150 marked as classified, a number that ignited intense concern at the Justice Department and helped trigger the criminal investigation that led F.B.I. agents to swoop into Mar-a-Lago this month seeking to recover more, multiple people briefed on the matter said.
The reference to the “initial batch” is important because the retrievals didn’t end there. According to the Times’ reporting, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, the first phase in the process began in January — roughly a year after the former president left the White House. The Republican was not supposed to take classified materials with him on the way out.
But he did anyway, and when pressed to return what he’d taken, Trump was willing to part with 150 documents. In theory, if that total represented the entirety of the former president’s haul, this would’ve effectively brought the matter, or at least a key part of it, to a close.
Except, that represented only part of a larger whole. Trump agreed to turn over the 150 documents, but he kept many more for reasons that have not yet been explained. According to the Times, when each of the steps are considered together — the January batch, a follow-up meeting in June, and the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search — federal officials have recovered “more than 300 documents with classified markings” from the former president.
That’s an enormous number, laying waste to the idea that we’re only talking about a handful of love letters between Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
For that matter, some Republicans have pushed the idea that a modest number of pages got caught up in the former president’s rushed packing during a chaotic transition period (made chaotic by Trump’s attempted coup). If the controversy involved three pieces of paper, each of which were quickly returned, that might be credible. But when this involves “more than 300 documents” that Trump tried to keep indefinitely, the talking point is rendered foolish.
What’s more, the Times reported that the documents were fairly broad in nature, including materials from the CIA, FBI, and the National Security Agency, “spanning a variety of topics of national security interest.” This was not, in other words, a single shiny object that captured the former president’s attention.
But just as important was this detail from the article: “Mr. Trump went through the boxes himself in late 2021, according to multiple people briefed on his efforts, before turning them over.” When it comes to assigning responsibility — legal or otherwise — this detail is critical. If accurate, it tells us that Trump not only took classified materials, he also personally reviewed the spoils of his pilfering, deciding which classified materials he felt most entitled to, federal laws and national security interests be damned. Making matters just a bit worse, the Times also shed light on the June meeting, when a Trump lawyer signed a letter, falsely claiming that the former president and his team had turned over all of its classified documents: On June 3, Jay Bratt, the chief of the counterespionage section of the national security division of the Justice Department, went to Mar-a-Lago to meet with two of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb, and retrieve any remaining classified material to satisfy the subpoena…. Mr. Bratt and the agents who joined him were given a sheaf of classified material, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Mr. Corcoran then drafted a statement, which Ms. Bobb, who is said to be the custodian of the documents, signed. It asserted that, to the best of her knowledge, all classified material that was there had been returned, according to two people familiar with the statement.
But all of the classified documents had not been returned. Did Bobb knowingly sign a document making false assertions to the Justice Department about classified materials, or did her client mislead her as part of an effort to conceal evidence and keep secret documents to which he was not entitled?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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