Trump team claimed boxes at Mar-a-Lago were
only news clippings
The 2021 assertion to the National Archives vastly misrepresented the scale and variety of documents, including classified records, later recovered from Trump’s property
Months before National Archives officials retrieved hundreds of classified documents in 15 boxes from former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, they were told that none of the material was sensitive or classified and that Trump had only 12 boxes of “news clippings,”
During a September 2021 phone call with top Archives lawyer Gary Stern, former deputy White House counsel Pat Philbin offered reassuring news: Philbin said he had talked to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who made the assertion about the dozen boxes of clippings...
The characterization made in the call vastly misrepresented the scale and variety of documents, including classified records, eventually recovered by the Archives or the FBI.
Philbin said that Meadows also told him no documents had been destroyed, according to two people with knowledge of the call and a third person with knowledge of Stern’s [NARA lawyer] contemporaneous account of the call.
Here we come back to the 48 empty folders with classification markings. 45th DID destroy official documents--regularly--It has been photo-documented that he flushed some down White House toilets, AF-1 toilets, God knows where all.
Stern had sought the call because he believed there were still more than two dozen boxes of materials that Trump had, and he also had concerns about whether digital records had been properly retained...
And here we come back to Trump's Praetorian Guard, the Secret Service, another loose end that President Biden has not tied up. The S.S. destroyed "digital records", their agents text messages on their cell phones. The S.S. tried to spirit Vice President Pence away from the Capitol on Jan. 6 so that he could not perform his legal, ministerial role of publicly tallying the electoral votes. The S.S. were, and continue to be, the Coup Part Two nucleus, along with the hundreds of those in the police and military who are members of QAnon. Together S.S., cops and soldiers are 45th's Brownshirts. They have been at work throughout the country since the Restoration on Nov. 3, 2020 and the failed coup of Jan. 6. There is grave danger to democracy in America and a threat to the safety of President Biden and Vice President Harris. That has been no action on the S.S. by the president that has been publicly reported. He seems oblivious to the danger or is unconcerned, as he is about the fullness and fairness of the 2024 election.
In the year since the call, Archives and Justice Department officials have recovered 42 boxes of records from Trump’s Palm Beach, Fla., property, including 15 boxes handed over by Trump’s representatives to the Archives last January and an additional 27 boxes retrieved by the FBI during a court-authorized search of Mar-a-Lago last month.
The records recovered by the FBI included documents that detailed top-secret U.S. operations and information about a foreign government’s nuclear-defense readiness...Some of the documents retrieved by the Archives had also been torn up, which Trump had a habit of doing.
So there you have it: 45th couldn't get to the toilet in time. Meadows through Philbin claimed there were just 12 boxes at MAL and that they contained only paper clippings. In the event 42 boxes were recovered, and not merely of newspaper clippings but hundreds of classified documents--and the empty 48 folders.
In an email to Trump lawyers in May 2021...Stern wrote that there were roughly two dozen boxes that were kept in the White House residence that had yet to be returned to the Archives, “despite a determination by [former White House counsel] Pat Cipollone in the final days of the administration that they need to be.”
In court filings, the Justice Department has released an email from the Archives to Trump’s counsel stating that NARA officials had “ongoing communications” with Trump’s representatives “throughout 2021” to try to secure missing presidential records, which resulted in the transfer of only the first 15 boxes.
Trump told conservative radio host [and WaPo opinion writer] Hugh Hewitt on Thursday that there would be “problems in the country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before” if he were indicted on charges of mishandling classified records.
“I don’t think the people of the United States would stand for it,” Trump said.
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Loose Cannon appointed Raymond J. Dearie, a former chief federal judge in New York, as a special master to sort through the documents...The Justice Department is barred from using any of those documents in
its criminal probe until Dearie reviews them, significantly slowing down
the inquiry. DOJ is appealing Loose Cannon's Order.