Hugo Lowell
Wednesday August 31, 2022
The Department of Justice has released redacted photographs of documents seized during the search of Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Photograph: AP
The FBI searched Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida
after it obtained evidence there was probably an effort to conceal classified
documents in defiance of a grand jury subpoena and despite his lawyers
suggesting otherwise, the justice department said in a court filing.
The recounting - contained in a filing from the justice
department that opposed Trump’s request to get an independent review of
materials seized from Mar-a-Lago - amounted to the most detailed picture of
potential obstruction of justice outlined to date by the government.
“Efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s
investigation,” the justice department alleged in its filing on Tuesday night.
Among the new revelations in the 36-page filing were that
FBI agents recovered three classified documents from desks inside Trump’s office
at Mar-a-Lago and additional classified files from a storage room, contrary to
what the former president’s lawyers indicated to the justice department.
The justice department said in the submission that, after a
Trump lawyer in May accepted service of a subpoena for materials removed from
the White House, the lawyer and Trump’s records custodian in June gave the
government a single Redweld legal envelope, double-taped, that contained the
documents.
As Trump’s lawyer and custodian turned over the folder to
Jay Bratt, the justice department’s chief counterintelligence official, the
custodian produced and signed a letter certifying a “diligent search” had been
conducted and all documents responsive to the subpoena were being returned.
The lawyer for the former president also stated to Bratt
that all the records in the envelope had come from one storage room at
Mar-a-Lago, that there were no other records elsewhere at the resort, and that
all boxes of materials brought from the White House had been searched, the
justice department said.
The custodian who signed the letter has been identified by
two sources familiar with the matter as Christina Bobb, a member of Trump’s
in-house counsel team, though a copy of the letter reproduced by the justice
department in the filing redacted the custodian’s name.
But the FBI subsequently uncovered evidence through multiple
sources that classified documents remained at Mar-a-Lago in defiance of the
subpoena, and that other government records were “likely” concealed and removed
from the storage room, according to the filing.
The justice department said in its submission that the
evidence – details of which were redacted in the search warrant affidavit
partially unsealed last week – allowed it to obtain a warrant to enter
Mar-a-Lago, where FBI agents found more classified documents in Trump’s private
office.
“The government seized 33 items of evidence, mostly boxes,”
from its search of Trump’s resort in Palm Beach, Florida, the filing said.
“Three classified documents that were not located in boxes, but rather were
located in the desks in the ‘45 Office’, were also seized.”
Illustrating the contents of the 8 August seizure, in an
exhibit resembling how the justice department would show the results of a drug
bust, the filing included a photo of the retrieved documents emblazoned with
classification markings including “top secret” and “secret” designations.
The justice department added that the documents collected
most recently by the FBI included materials marked as “sensitive compartmented
information”, while other documents were so sensitive that the FBI
counterintelligence agents reviewing the materials needed additional security
clearances.
“That the FBI,” the filing said, “recovered twice as many
documents with classification markings as the ‘diligent search’ that the former
president’s counsel and other representatives had weeks to perform, calls into
serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification.”
After painting an extraordinary portrait of the hurdles that
the justice department had to overcome to even recover the documents that
belong to the government, prosecutors argued that Trump had no basis to seek
the appointment of a so-called special master to review the files.
The request for a special master in this case fails, the
filing argued, because Trump is attempting to use the potential for executive
privilege to withhold documents from the executive branch – which the supreme
court decided in Nixon v GSA did not hold.
The justice department added that even if Trump could somehow successfully
assert executive privilege, it would not apply to the current case because the
documents marked classified were seized as part of a criminal investigation
into the very handling of the documents themselves.
Trump is expected to press on with his request for a special
master and to obtain a more detailed list of materials taken from Mar-a-Lago,
according to a source close to his legal team, which also disputed that the
justice department’s filing raised the likelihood for an obstruction charge.
On Tuesday morning, before the justice department filed its
response minutes before a court-imposed midnight deadline, Trump added a third
lawyer, the former Florida solicitor general Christopher Kise, to his outside
legal team, said two sources with direct knowledge of the matter.