Federal prosecutors on Monday released new photos in Donald Trump’s classified documents case, claiming they show the former president stored classified information in a “haphazard manner.”
The photo, taken by the FBI and one of Trump’s co-defendants in the case, was released by prosecutors as part of an effort to reject arguments by the defense that the 45th president’s due process rights had been violated.
Photos show classified and top-secret White House documents mixed in boxes with clothing and memorabilia from the 78-year-old former president’s time in the Oval Office.
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team alleged that Trump stored the boxes of classified documents in a “disorganized manner” and that the items inside – including shirts, shoes, photographs, magazines, newspapers, greeting cards, binders, Christmas ornaments and letters – were “clearly disorganized.”
Smith’s lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, was filed in response to a motion by Trump’s lawyers to dismiss a 40-count indictment against the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, alleging that federal agents did not keep documents intact or follow the order in which they were found in the boxes.
Trump’s legal team argues that when the FBI sifted through boxes of materials after a search of the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2022, they rearranged the materials in the boxes to destroy “exculpatory evidence.”
“Given Mr. Trump’s haphazard storage of the box, Mr. Trump argues that the precise order of the items in the box when it left the White House was material to his defense,” prosecutors wrote in the filing.
Smith’s team argued that while the exact order of the substances in each box may not have been recorded, FBI agents maintained “box-to-box integrity.”
“This was not a case of documents of the same size neatly stacked in file folders or red welds or perfectly arranged in boxes,” prosecutors wrote.
In addition to the FBI photos, prosecutors also presented photographs taken in December 2021 by Trump aide and co-defendant Walt Nauta that show toppled boxes and documents strewn across the floor of a Mar-a-Lago warehouse, to bolster the government’s argument that Trump had kept the items in no particular order of importance.
The government said the box contained items “of value only to Mr. Trump” and therefore clearly belonged to the former president.
Inside the box, the FBI found more than 100 documents marked as classified, including some containing national defense information, Smith said.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges in the case.
