Kaitlan Collins of CNN reports on-air about the background on the FBI raid at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago in Florida, and it has a couple odd turns. To summarize:
On June 8th, Trump’s lawyers met with federal lawyers about getting the final papers that Trump held in Mar-a-Lago. (I’m still not clear on why Trump still had boxes of documents from his term in office in Mar-a-Lago after the 15 boxes were found.) Trump himself stopped by the meeting of the two sets of lawyers. Trump’s lawyers showed the federal lawyers the room where the boxes were being stored, in a locked room in the basement.
A couple days later, the government sent the Mar-a-Lago lawyers a letter instructing them to put additional security on the door leading to the room where the papers were being kept. Mar-a-Lago put a padlock on the door. (Really. That’s not snark.)
Some of the CNN analysts noted that Trump had reportedly been negotiating to keep some correspondence he received from foreign leaders–so-called “Head of State letters”–which made him feel important.
Some possible scenarios that would push the government to act now to secure the documents:
- the government realized there were highly classified documents mixed in with other documents.
- officials got word that the documents were being moved somewhere else.
- officials got a tip about the documents being unsecured.
I also for a moment played with the idea that Trump or someone in his camp was selling the official documents, or Trump had given them to staffers as mementos.
Regardless if the documents were Head of State Letters or some other type of official paperwork, the material is the property of the United States under the Presidential Records Act. They are not Trump’s private property.