Four documents with classification markings were discovered in Donald Trump’s private quarters at Mar-a-Lago months after federal agents conducted an exhaustive sweep of the property, something a federal judge described with disbelief as part of a trove of documents newly unsealed on Tuesday.
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell seemed to find it dubious that the former president could have possibly missed the records, which constituted “a box containing four documents or partial documents, totaling six pages, with classification markings” found in a closet in his office.
Authorities were alerted to the existence of the box around Dec. 15, 2022, the judge said, four months after the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago and retrieved dozens of classified and top-secret records. Trump’s lawyers turned the box and its contents over to the government on Jan. 5 of the following year, “in compliance with another subpoena.”
But that wasn’t the last of the leftover folders, according to Howell. While handing over the box, Trump’s people also gave the FBI “one empty folder and another mostly empty folder marked ‘Classified Evening Summary’” that had been found in the former president’s bedroom.
“Notably, no excuse is provided as to how the former president could miss the classified-marked documents found in his own bedroom at Mar-a-Lago,” Howell wrote.
In her opinion, penned in March 2023, Howell found that the government had presented sufficient evidence that Trump had “willfully” tried to shield the documents scooped up by the FBI in Aug. 2022. (She noted that there was no direct evidence that Trump had “deliberately retained, or was even aware of,” the records found after the raid.)
As a result, she said she would grant the prosecution’s request to question Trump lawyers under the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege. The unusual step to force Trump attorney Evan Corcoran to testify before a grand jury had been previously reported, but the rationale for her decision was only unsealed on Tuesday.
In it, Howell said that prosecutors in special counsel Jack Smith’s office had adequately demonstrated that Trump knew his attorney, Evan Corcoran, was unknowingly lying to the government when he told agents in June 2022 that all classified materials had been returned. The judge explained that “the crime-fraud exception pierces the attorney-client privilege even when the attorney is an unknowing tool of his client.”
In addition to Corcoran’s testimony before the grand jury, Howell said that 88 documents he’d been attempting to keep away from prosecutors over supposed attorney-client privilege also had to be turned over, with the government having shown they were “sufficiently ‘in furtherance’ of the former president’s criminal scheme.”
The partially-redacted decision and a raft of other exhibits were unsealed as part of Trump’s efforts to have his case dismissed over alleged “prosecutorial misconduct.”
Among the filings unsealed on Tuesday was also an operations order showing that FBI agents were authorized to use “deadly force” during the Mar-a-Lago raid—standard protocol for the Department of Justice, but something Trump immediately seized upon.
“WOW,” he posted on TruthSocial. “I just came out of the Biden Witch Hunt Trial in Manhattan, the ‘Icebox,’ and was shown Reports that Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE. NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE, THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY.”
Other denizens of MAGA World were quick to pick up the former president’s call, with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) screeching on X that the “Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light.”
In a statement to The Washington Post, the FBI said that it “followed standard protocol in this search as we do for all search warrants, which includes a standard policy statement limiting the use of deadly force. No one ordered additional steps to be taken and there was no departure from the norm in this matter.”
Judge Aileen Cannon, who took over the classified documents case from Howell after Trump was indicted on 37 criminal counts last summer, ordered the documents released on Tuesday unsealed. She indefinitely delayed the start of the trial earlier this month over the thicket of outstanding pre-trial motions and classification issues that have yet to be resolved.
Trump has denied all wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty. The trial is unlikely to begin before the November presidential election.
