In August 2022, FBI officials executed a court-approved search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. The results were devastating: The evidence suggested that Donald Trump not only took classified materials that didn’t belong to him, and not only defied a subpoena, he also stored highly sensitive national security documents carelessly around his glorified country club.
The photographs of materials stacked on a ballroom stage, spilled on the floor of a storage room, and placed in a bathroom are tough to forget.
Of course, that’s what the FBI found when it went room to room. But what if there were other rooms the bureau didn’t check? ABC News reported that special counsel Jack Smith’s team has questioned several witnesses about a closet and a so-called “hidden room” at Mar-a-Lago.
As described to ABC News, the line of questioning in several interviews ahead of Trump’s indictment last year on classified document charges suggests that — long after the FBI seized dozens of boxes and more than 100 documents marked classified from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate — Smith’s team was trying to determine if there might still be more classified documents there.
According to the report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, some of the investigators involved in the case later came to believe there was a locked closet that “should have been opened and checked.”
ABC News added that investigators also came to believe that the former president “allegedly had the closet’s lock changed while his attorney was in Mar-a-Lago’s basement, searching for classified documents in a storage room that he was told would have all such documents.”
As for the prospect of a “hidden room,” ABC’s sources said there was a room connected to the Republican’s bedroom that also went unsearched.
There’s no shortage of questions, which at least for now, appear to lack answers.
If the reporting is correct, what was in the places that the FBI didn’t search? Did Trump order someone to change the locks on the closet in question? Wouldn’t that constitute obstruction? Why did the FBI leave these spaces unchecked? Did it have anything to do with the apparent fact that some FBI officials did not even want to do this search in the first place? Finally, if we take a step back, it’s also worth considering how, exactly, investigators came to learn about the possibility of an unsearched “hidden” room. Wouldn’t this suggest there’s someone close to Trump who has spilled the beans? Watch this space.
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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