In his bedroom
The Washington Post has an interesting detail:
Federal Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart read the affidavit and approved the search on Aug. 5. Three days later, FBI agents dressed in polos and khakis executed the search warrant at the Palm Beach estate, carting away an additional 20 boxes of items from a bedroom, office and a first-floor storage room, according to an inventory of what was retrieved from the property that was made public earlier this month.
A bedroom and an office. I guess we should rejoice they didn’t find any in the lobby or the hotel dining room?
The affidavit says federal agents sought permission to conduct the search after reviewing the contents of 15 boxes Trump returned to the National Archives earlier this year and finding
founddocuments with classification markings. Some were marked “HCS,” a category of highly classified government information; others related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and material meant not to be shared with foreign nations. The “HCS” acronym stands for “HUMINT Control Systems” and refers to the government systems used to protect intelligence gathered from secret human sources, the affidavit says.
Why would a former president even want that stuff? It’s not his business any more, so what would he think he was doing with it? Apart from selling it to the highest bidder?
The affidavit also includes a May 25 letter from Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran to the Justice Department, defending the president’s conduct by arguing Trump had the ultimate classification authority within the government.
How could that possibly be true? The job doesn’t continue after you lose the election; you’re out, you’ve finished, you don’t get to play any more.
I have two competing guesses as to what documents Trump had. These are sheer speculation on my part:
1) He just grabbed whatever was in the White House in those final days. He had been in denial about having to leave, and refusing to make any preparations, and so in a fit of petulance he just took anything that wasn’t nailed down. The documents wouldn’t necessarily have any particular connection or focus other than “stuff that the White House happened to be briefed on in the last few weeks.”
2) The documents pertain to the investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s connection to Russia. Oops, sorry, I mean the “Russia Hoax.” There was a lot of yammering in right-wing circles in the final months of the Trump Administration about how Trump was going to declassify everything relating to that investigation, and then boy, would the fat be in the fire because it would expose the Deep State Conspiracy etc etc. Of course that never happened, because the documents would actually be damaging to Trump by showing that there were worrying connections with Russia (even if not the kinds of stuff that was speculated on the left). But nobody wants to give the boss the bad news, so whichever underlings were assigned to review those documents never quite broke it to him that this was a dead end for him. So in the final days of the administration, he demands they round up all of the classified stuff on that subject and ship it to Mar-a-Lago, where he can personally go over it and eventually expose the dark conspiracy against him and humiliate all of his enemies. Of course, again, Trump is lazy and isn’t going to get through all those documents quickly, and he gets discouraged that he isn’t finding anything juicy or helpful, so the docs mostly just sit there. (This would explain the presence of signals intelligence and FISA docs, among other things.)
My theory is that Trump thought he might be able to trade his boxes of miscellaneous documents for the use of Putin’s dacha for the rest of his life.
I think theory 1 sounds more plausible in light of the account of the way he picks up a document and looks at it for a minute and then puts it down somewhere random. That sounds as if it’s all just Stuff to him, Stuff that memorializes how important he was.
Considering that he sees classified documents as either scratch paper or toilet paper, depending on the need at the moment, I think that #1 is more feasible.
I can’t help but thinking what he was trying to flush when he complained that it sometimes takes 15 flushes to clear out what’s in the toilet. He’s no Oliver North, that’s for sure. Ollie at least had Fawn shred top secret documents, and if Trump had thought to do so it may have taken fewer flushes.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/07/politics/trump-americans-flushing-toilets-intl
A more cynical me might think that he was holding them for women like “Anna de Rothschild” and exchanging glances at docs for favors. But, that’s probably more Don Jrs style.