Newly released photos from FBI's Mar-a-Lago search show Trump keepsakes alongside sensitive records
Washington — Newly revealed photographs taken by the FBI during its August 2022 search of former President Donald Trump's South Florida resort shed further light on how the former president kept keepsakes from his time in office alongside documents bearing classification markings.
The photos, some of which had not been publicly released, were included as exhibits accompanying a Monday court filing from special counsel Jack Smith in the ongoing federal case against Trump in South Florida. Prosecutors have accused the former president of mishandling records containing the nation's secrets after leaving the White House in January 2021 and obstructing the Justice Department's investigation.
Trump was charged with 40 counts, including the unlawful retention of national defense information, and has pleaded not guilty. His presidential campaign did not immediately return a request for comment on Smith's latest filing.
The filing from Smith's office is in response to an effort by Trump to toss out the indictment and suppress all evidence seized during the court-authorized search of Mar-a-Lago. More than 100 documents bearing classified markings were recovered by the FBI in August 2022, and 21 of the records underlie counts of willful retention of national defense information that Trump is charged with. In all, federal investigators collected over 300 sensitive government records during their investigation into the former president.
Trump has argued that the FBI agents who executed the search warrant failed to maintain the order of the documents as they were found and did not take photos to show the sequence of records in each box containing them.
The special counsel acknowledged in a May 3 filing that there were some boxes where the documents were not in the same order as they were at the time of the FBI's search. But prosecutors have contended the alterations were inconsequential to the underlying conduct Trump and his two codefendants are accused of and wrote "where precisely within a box a classified document was stored at Mar-a-Lago does not bear in any way" on the defendants' ability to properly examine evidence.
Trump's legal team has claimed that the failure to keep the documents intact and the order maintained violated his due process rights. They accused prosecutors of withholding information about the records' sequence because it would undercut their claim that Trump knew classified documents were stored in the boxes alongside other personal items and willfully retained them after his presidency.
Smith's team, though, argued in his latest filing that there is no basis for throwing out the charges against Trump because of a disruption of the precise order of documents seized from Mar-a-Lago.
"Trump personally chose to keep documents containing some of the nation's most highly guarded secrets in cardboard boxes along with a collection of other personally chosen keepsakes of various sizes and shapes from his presidency," prosecutors on the special counsel's team said.
They accused the former president of maintaining the boxes containing sensitive material in a "haphazard manner" and said the FBI agents who conducted the search "did so professionally, thoroughly, and carefully under challenging circumstances." Smith is separately seeking to bar Trump from making public statements that endanger law enforcement officers involved in the case. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over proceedings, did not seem receptive to prosecutors' arguments to modify the conditions of his release during a hearing on the matter Monday.
See the photographs taken by the FBI during its search of Mar-a-Lago and included in Smith's filing:
The photos taken by Walt Nauta, an aide to Trump, in late December 2021 show boxes in a storage room at Mar-a-Lago that had fallen over, their contents spilled onto the floor. Nauta was also charged by Smith in the documents case and has pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors said that one of those fallen boxes, identified in court filings as A-35, contained a classified record that the FBI recovered during its August 2022 search. A photo taken by the FBI during the search shows stacks of boxes, including A-35, in the storage room at Mar-a-Lago, roughly eight months after Nauta sent a text message that included the images of the fallen boxes.
Smith said in his filing that the classified record in box A-35 underlies Count 8 of the indictment, which describes the document as dated Oct. 4, 2019, and concerns "military capabilities of a foreign country." The record has a "SECRET//REL TO USA, FVEY" classification marking, according to the indictment. FVEY is the Five Eyes intelligence alliance comprised of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.S. and the United Kingdom.
During the search of Mar-a-Lago, a group of agents and members of the so-called Evidence Response Team reviewed the boxes from the storage room to look for any documents bearing classification markings that were subject to seizure, according to Smith's team. If such a record was found, the team member removed it, separated it, recorded the box where it was located and replaced the sensitive document with a placeholder sheet, prosecutors explained in their filing.
That placeholder sheet was a preprinted classified cover sheet, but after agents ran out of those cover sheets, they used blank pieces of paper with "handwritten annotations to identify the document," according to Smith's filing.
As part of the process, the Evidence Response Team took photos of the documents, with the cover sheets added by FBI agents, next to the box they were found in, prosecutors wrote.
In addition to searching the storage room, the FBI also went through the "45 Office," which consisted of an anteroom where staff had desks, the former president's office, a closet attached to Trump's office, and two bathrooms.
Agents with a filter team, which first looked for any material that might be deemed privileged, found in the closet a "blue, covered, leatherbound box full of various papers, including numerous newspapers, newspaper clippings, magazines, note cards of various sizes, presidential correspondence, empty folders, and loose cover sheets for classified information, as well as documents marked classified," according to the special counsel's filing.
The filter team member then alerted the case team, whose agents were investigating the case, that documents marked classified had been discovered in the box, and two agents went through it, the filing states. They found "numerous" documents with classified markings, some of which had classification cover sheets attached, as well as loose cover sheets, the special counsel's team said.
The FBI took photos of the blue box with its cover off, prosecutors wrote.
Smith and his team argued in his filing that the contents of the boxes belonged to Trump and no one else, and said agents going through them during the Mar-a-Lago search found keepsakes "valuable only to Trump."
Prosecutors wrote that the boxes "had no apparent organization whatsoever" and contained an array of items: clothing, picture frames, magazines, shoes, newspapers, newspaper clippings, greeting cards, binders, Christmas ornaments and correspondence. Photos taken by the FBI show the boxes and some of their contents to "provide a sense of the variety of items" in them, with classified cover sheets positioned alongside the boxes, according to Smith's filing.
Katrina Kaufman contributed to this report