Four months after the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago estate, Donald Trump's attorneys discovered four documents marked "classified" in his personal bedroom.
That revelation was among several cited by U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell in a newly unsealed 2023 opinion that found prosecutors had presented compelling evidence that Trump knowingly stashed national security documents in his home and then tried to conceal them when the Justice Department tried to retrieve them.
In her
87-page opinion, Howell said the likelihood that Trump committed crimes was a basis to permit special counsel Jack Smith to question the former president's attorney Evan Corcoran on topics that would normally be shielded by attorney-client privilege. Prosecutors, Howell said, had demonstrated that Trump knew Corcoran had been tasked in June 2022 with informing the government that all classified materials had been returned, "a representation that the former president … knew to be wrong."
The FBI's August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago confirmed that dozens of other classified documents remained on the property — but as Howell notes, there were at least two more rounds of classified materials found on Trump's property following additional searches.
Throughout the opinion, Howell — who was chief judge of the Washington, D.C. federal district court at the time — described with varying degrees of incredulity how four documents with classification markings could have been discovered in Trump's private quarters months after prosecutors had subpoenaed them and the FBI conducted its own exhaustive search of the property.
"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, an Obama appointee, wrote.
In a footnote, Howell also noted that another Trump adviser connected to his Save America PAC had acknowledged scanning the contents of the box that contained the classified materials in 2021 and storing them on a personal laptop provided by the PAC.
Trump's office provided the box that contained the four records to the FBI in January 2023, Howell noted.
