Photos taken during the FBI search at his Mar-a-Lago beach club show boxes where the former president’s personal memorabilia is mixed with classified documents, which he is suspected of having appropriated by the hundreds upon his departure from the White House.
Clothes, picture frames, magazines, shoes, newspapers, press clippings, greeting cards, binders, letters, and even… Christmas decorations. This is not the description of a shambles, but rather of the contents of the classified archive boxes searched by the FBI in August 2022 at the Mar-a-Lago estate, the extravagant Florida property of Donald Trump. A case which resulted in the former President of the United States being indicted in June 2023 by the American federal courts, which accuses him of having violated the “Espionage Act”. Recently, prosecutors in the case released new photos taken by intelligence agents, depicting the “disorderly manner” with which the former head of state stored the documents in question, reports the American channel CBS News.
Some show dozens of boxes stacked in a storage room, with some semblance of organization. But inside, it’s a whole different story: according to prosecutors, the boxes “had no apparent organization” and contained in particular souvenirs “which only have value for Trump.” FBI photographs “give an idea of the variety of objects” that they contain. Several of them show open cardboard boxes filled with documents, the lid placed next to it, with a stamped plastic sheet “confidential”, “secret” or «top secret» placed by the FBI when classified documents were found there. In one of them, we see white clothes striped with black. In another, it is a copy of the New York Timeswith the front page of whistleblower and FBI informant Val Broeksmit – who died in April 2022 under unclear circumstances.
During their search, more than 100 documents bearing classified markings were recovered by the FBI, 21 of which were the basis of Donald Trump’s accusations of deliberate withholding of information relating to national defense. . In total, federal investigators collected more than 300 sensitive government documents during their investigation, including intelligence reports relating to a foreign nuclear power, Iranian missile programs, and even espionage from rival China.
A search “in difficult circumstances”
In his latest request for dismissal, Donald Trump claimed that the FBI agents who carried out the search did not respect the order in which the documents were found, and did not take photos showing the order of the documents in each box that contained them.
On May 3, Jack Smith, the special prosecutor in charge of the case, acknowledged that the documents were not arranged in the same order as when the FBI searched some of the boxes, but that these changes did not motivate in no way the rejection of the accusations made against the former Republican president. “Donald Trump personally chose to store in cardboard boxes documents containing some of the nation’s best-kept secrets, as well as a collection of other memorabilia from his presidency, varying in size and shape,” said prosecutors from Jack Smith’s team. FBI agents who conducted the search “did it in a professional, thorough and careful manner in difficult circumstances”, they added.
The photos, some of which have not been made public, were included as exhibits in the case filed June 24 by special prosecutor Jack Smith. According to the American television channel CNBC, the federal trial which was initially scheduled to begin on May 20 was postponed last month to an undetermined date by the federal judge.
