The Justice Department is reportedly investigating how a box of classified documents ended up at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home months after the FBI initially conducted a search of the residence in August 2021.
An additional box that contained classified documents among copies of presidential schedules was discovered in December after the DOJ ordered another search of Trump’s private residence, just four months after the initial search of the resort. It was during that search that the former president’s legal team found the additional materials and handed them over to investigators, according to CNN.
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“When the team found the box, it was initially believed that the FBI had simply missed it during the search warrant,” one source told the outlet. “But upon further investigation, the legal team discovered that an aide had moved it as part of her job function.”
The box was initially sent from a longtime Trump staffer to a lower-level aide in the fall of 2021 with instructions to scan the presidential schedules inside the box electronically, according to the outlet. The aide then transported the box to Mar-a-Lago, where she worked.
Because there was not an available scanning machine at the former president’s residence, the aide scanned the files on her phone to upload them onto a Trump-owned laptop, CNN reported. As she was sifting through the documents, the aide did not notice there were documents marked as classified, according to the outlet.
The aide finished scanning the documents in November 2021, and the box was then reportedly moved to an office in downtown Palm Beach.
The papers remained in the Palm Beach office even after Trump officials handed over 15 boxes of classified materials to the National Archives in January 2022, and again when the DOJ subpoenaed the former president in May 2022 for all sensitive documents in the former president’s possession. DOJ investigators later visited Mar-a-Lago in June to search for more documents.
Those searches eventually led to the high-profile search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in August, when the FBI recovered about 33 boxes of roughly 11,000 documents. Approximately 100 of those documents contained classified markings, with some being considered at the top secret level.
However, the box that was scanned by the Trump aide was still at the Palm Beach office during that search. It was later retrieved in the fall when the aide brought the materials back to Mar-a-Lago to work alongside Trump in a new role, according to CNN.
Three months later, in November, Trump’s legal team hired a pair of investigators to search for additional classified materials at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, Trump Tower in New York, a storage unit in Florida, and the Palm Beach office where the box was previously held. During that search, two additional documents were found and handed over to prosecutors.
DOJ officials then pressed the officials to conduct another search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. During that December search, the pair found the box containing classified materials among Trump’s presidential schedules, according to CNN.
The box’s movement and the timeline of how it was discovered has become a major focus of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, the outlet reported. Smith was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to oversee the investigation in November.
Much of Smith’s investigation is expected to focus on Trump’s instructions to staff while the materials were being moved, according to CNN. Some investigators have compared the situation to “a shell game with classified documents,” the outlet reported.
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Trump officials have maintained that the aide was unaware the materials were marked as classified at the time of the scanning.
“After we did the search in December and found within this box of thousands that there were a couple of pages that had a little marking at the bottom, which we turned over, after that, we found out that she had scanned the box so that it would be digitized,” Tim Parlatore, an attorney for Trump, told CNN. “She had no idea that there was any classification markings on anything. And as soon as we found out about that, we called up the DOJ to let them know and immediately provided them access to it.”