When Donald Trump was indicted last year for pilfering reams of classified documents from the White House after he was voted out of office, court filings included photos of U.S. government secrets stashed arbitrarily throughout the former president’s country-club-turned-residence: in, among other unsecured spaces, a ballroom, a bathroom, and Trump’s bedroom.
On Monday night, following Trump’s latest disingenuous contention—that the FBI agents who seized and reviewed the contents of boxes upon boxes of sensitive materials stored at Mar-a-Lago “failed to maintain” the exact order of the documents within, which Trump now claims could somehow exonerate him—government lawyers filed a scathing response letting the air out of the presumptive GOP presidential nominee’s contentions.
Far from a neatly ordered system under which Trump, a notorious pack rat, maintained a precise inventory of important documents, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, along with prosecutors Jay Bratt and David Harbach, noted the “cluttered collection of keepsakes,” which “traveled from one readily accessible location to another” around the Palm Beach, Florida club.