A federal judge on Friday unsealed a detailed list of documents and other materials recovered by FBI agents from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
The list detailed the variety of locations within Mar-a-Lago where investigators allegedly found classified documents — including Trump’s office and boxes held in a storage room — and numbered the alarmingly large inventory of confidential, secret and top secret materials recovered from Trump’s residence.
Also notable, the list included scores of “empty folders” with “CLASSIFIED” banners and labels reading “Return to Staff Secretary/Military Aide,” the government said. In addition to the dozens of restricted documents, the filing listed thousands of “Government Documents/Photographs without Classification Markings.” One box in Trump’s office included 640 such documents, according to the list, and several boxes in the storage room contained more than one thousand of those records.
The list also showed that the classified, secret and top secret material was allegedly co-mingled with government documents not labeled with a classification marking, as well as material that may legitimately belong to Trump.
One listing of a box recovered from Trump’s storage room claimed confidential documents were intermingled with clothes, gifts, and a book. The entry inventoried “30 Magazines/Newspapers/Press Articles and Other Printed Media” dating from 2008 to 2019, “11 US Government Documents with CONFIDENTIAL Classification Markings,” “21 US Government Documents with SECRET Classification Markings,” “3 Articles of Clothing/Gift Items,” “1 Book,” and “255 US Government Documents/Photographs without Classification Markings.”
In another box recovered from the storage room, empty folders labeled “CLASSIFIED” and “Return to Staff Secretary/Military Aide” allegedly sat next to books, classified documents, and dozens of printed media material and government documents and photographs.
U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, said during a hearing Thursday that she planned to unseal the list, labeled a “detailed property inventory” by prosecutors. Cannon hasn’t decided yet on another question discussed in the hearing, Donald Trump’s effort to appoint a third-party special master to sort through documents he asserts are protected by attorney-client and executive privilege.
The latter point is particularly alarming to constitutional scholars: The Justice Department investigators are current representatives of the Executive Branch, not Trump, and President Biden has not asserted executive privilege related to the Mar-a-Lago documents.
Federal prosecutors included the detailed list along with a status review filed under seal on Tuesday. The update said the investigative team had completed a preliminary review of the seized materials, except for potentially attorney-client privileged materials, and that the reviewed material was part of an ongoing process informing “preliminary determinations about investigative avenues.”
“The seized materials will continue to be used to further the government’s investigation, and the investigative team will continue to use and evaluate the seized materials as it takes further investigative steps, such as through additional witness interviews and grand jury practice,” the filing read.
“Additionally, all evidence pertaining to the seized items — including, but not limited to, the nature and manner in which they were stored, as well as any evidence with respect to particular documents or items of interest — will inform the government’s investigation.”
Read the list below:
Correction: Though the government has asserted that hundreds of documents from Mar-a-Lago included classification markings, there were thousands more listed as being without classification markings.
This post has been updated.
