“Mar-a-Lago has been a porous place ever since Trump declared his candidacy and started winning primaries several years ago,” said Aki Peritz, a former CIA counterterrorism analyst. “If you were any intelligence service, friendly or unfriendly, worth their salt, they would be concentrating their efforts on this incredibly porous place.”
When Trump departed office in January 2021, it was Mar-a-Lago where he decamped, sore from a loss he refused to acknowledge. The club, with its paying members and large oil paintings of Trump as a younger man, was a welcome refuge.
It was also the destination for dozens of cardboard boxes, packed in haste in the final days of his administration and shipped in white trucks to Florida. People familiar with Trump’s exit from Washington said the process of packing was rushed, in part because the outgoing President refused to engage in activities that would signal he’d lost the election. When it became clear he would need to leave the White House, items were quickly stowed away in boxes and shipped south without a clearly organized system.
“Trump kept a lot of things in his files that were not in the regular system or that had been given to him in the course of intelligence briefings,” said John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser. “I can easily imagine in the last chaotic days at the White House, since he didn’t think he was going to leave until the last minute, they were just throwing things in boxes, and it included a lot of things he had accumulated over the four years.”
Some boxes, including some containing classified documents, had ended up at the club after Trump’s presidency concluded. When federal investigators — including the chief of counterintelligence and export control at the Justice Department — traveled to Mar-a-Lago in June to discuss the classified documents with Trump and his lawyers, they voiced concern the room wasn’t properly secured.
The items taken away after Monday’s search included a leather box of documents, binders of photos, “miscellaneous top secret documents” and “Info re. President of France,” according to the search warrant. Trump and his allies have claimed he used his presidential prerogative to declassify the documents before leaving office, though haven’t provided any evidence of a formal process taking place.
“My only surprise was that there wasn’t even more taken to Mar-a-Lago,” Bolton said.
A habit of defying norms
Last week was not the first time federal intelligence officials worried about how Trump was keeping the government’s secrets. Nearly as soon as he took office, Trump demonstrated a willingness to flout protocols for guarding sensitive information.
Trump preferred to receive intelligence updates electronically, according to his third chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, though he sometimes asked to keep physical documents from classified briefings.
“From time to time the President would say, ‘Can I keep this?’ But we had entire teams of people to make sure those documents didn’t get left behind, didn’t get taken up to the residence. He would use them. That was his right as the President of the United States,” Mulvaney said.
Still, the tracking of records was not…
Read More: Mar-a-Lago — and Trump — have long caused concerns for US intelligence