FBI Investigates How Trump’s Box Of Classified Documents Was Moved To Mar-a-Lago Months AFTER The Search

Investigators in the investigation of special counsel Jack Smith interviewed a young aide to former President Donald Trump, who told them she used her cell phone to scan images contained in a box of documents that was discovered after the FBI searched Mar-a- Lake last summer.

The questions revolved around documents and a laptop that Trump’s legal team turned over to investigators in December, long after the lengthy back and forth that preceded the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago under a subpoena last summer. past.

The documents finally returned to government custody after a long saga that included being shipped from the DC area to Florida, where they resided inside Trump’s ornate private club, transferred to the Internet via cloud computing, and physically transported on the Palm. Beach area.

The documents first found their way to Mar-a-Lago after they were dumped in a ballroom and bridal suite without “any real warning”, a source familiar with the situation told DailyMail.com.

‘All things are here. And then the staff had to run out of Office Max and quickly buy a bunch of desks and turn the bridal suite into an office,” said the source, describing the period in which Trump set up a post-presidential office in his private Florida. . club.

The suite eventually became Trump’s office. The box eventually made its way to Trump’s post-presidency office in Palm Beach, where it sat for a while under the desk of a young assistant.

The events came a day a federal judge ordered Trump to be questioned in a lawsuit by FBI ‘lovers’ Peter Stzrok and Lisa Page, and a day after it was revealed Smith had subpoenaed Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in connection with his January 6 case. Investigation.

Trump’s aide at one point scanned the material with a cellphone and didn’t realize at the time that some of the documents contained classified markings. Subsequently, the data was downloaded to a laptop.

The documents in the box included the president’s daily schedules, according to the source. They were being digitized as part of an effort to collect programming materials for a variety of possible future purposes where staff might have wanted to access them, “whether it be a memoir, a documentary, speeches, for the next election, whatever.” . it is,” the source said.

Also included in the vast trove of documents are fact sheets for when the president was preparing to meet with a foreign leader.

The contents of the box were uploaded to the cloud in connection with that scan.

Investigators seem interested in finding out what was driving the movements of the documents, calling it a “scheming game”, although Trump’s team has said it has been fully complying with authorities.

A Trump lawyer, Tim Parlatore, told CNN that a Trump aide had not realized that the documents being handled were marked as classified.

The documents were evidently in a Palm Beach office at the time the FBI searched Trump’s home under a subpoena in August 2022.

Trump has repeatedly attacked the investigation as a “witch hunt.” Special Counsel Jack Smith

“After we did the search in December and found inside this box of thousands there were a couple of pages that had a little mark at the bottom, which we turned over, after that, we found out that she had scanned the box so that would be digitized’, Trump lawyer Tim Parlatore told the network.

He told CNN the deputy “had no idea there were classification marks on anything.” And as soon as we found out about that, we called the Department of Justice to let them know and we immediately gave them access,” he added.

A president’s agenda may contain information that is marked as classified at the time, but can later be declassified when his movements become public knowledge.

The assistant scanned documents from the “tennis shack” where she worked, according to CNN, and was then sent to the Palm Beach office in November 2021.

The box was evidently in the downtown office at the time the FBI searched it several months later.

But it was back in the bridal suite when Trump returned to his office in the fall of 2022. Trump tends to stay at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey during the summer.

Trump’s lawyers provided some documents to the government in January 2022, and again when Justice Department officials visited the club in June, ahead of the August search, where more than 100 documents marked classified were recovered. The box was discovered when he was back in Mar-a-Lago after the search.