jack
The Legendary Troll Kingdom
On his way into the Manhattan courtroom where he is being tried on 34 felony charges, former president Donald Trump on Tuesday spoke to reporters about another of his indictments, the one obtained by special counsel Jack Smith in Florida related to Trump’s possession of documents with classification markings.
“You probably saw last night that Jack Smith got caught with his hand in the cookie jar,” Trump said as part of a lengthy excoriation of prosecutors and President Biden. “It was released late last night, and it’s a big story. The documents case is a hoax created by them for election interference purposes. And so that one looks like it’s going asunder. A brilliant judge saw some facts and — I haven’t read what was revealed yet, it just came out. But the document hoax is indeed — it is indeed a hoax.”
If there was a big story about the documents case released Monday night, it escaped the notice of much of the traditional media. But there is a rumor rumbling around the right-wing media universe in which Biden and officials in his administration are accused of framing Trump on the Florida allegations. And, as is often the case with rumors that course through that universe, the claim being made is obviously not true.
This one was first elevated by Julie Kelly, a right-wing commentator whose efforts generally focus on defenses of individuals charged with participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. On Saturday morning, she shared a snippet of a court filing on social media.
“WELL WELL WELL I am pretty sure we never heard this part of the ‘classified documents/box’ story!” she wrote. Referring to an image of text, she asserted that an “FBI agent says [General Services Administration] was holding large quantity of Trump’s boxes in VA and then ordered his team to come get them. I am sure NOTHING hanky [sic] happened there …”
The image, which doesn’t identify the speaker, references “six pallets of items, boxes I believe” that the GSA contacted Trump’s post-presidential office about having shipped. In a subsequent post, Kelly posted an image from an interview with someone identified as “Person 10,” in which that individual indicated that they’d seen a pallet with bankers’ boxes — like those featured in photos from Mar-a-Lago.
“So an entire pallet full of boxes that had been held by GSA somewhere outside of DC is dumped at Mar-a-Lago,” Kelly wrote. “Apparently these are the boxes that ended up containing papers with ‘classified markings.’ ”
Off the allegation went. The right-wing website ZeroHedge picked it up, as did filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza. A narrative was born.
Before we assess the validity of the claim, it’s important to point out that even if Kelly’s presentation were accurate, the result would not be to exonerate Trump. The boxes mentioned in Kelly’s post were delivered to Mar-a-Lago in mid-September 2021. It wasn’t until January 2022 that material was shipped back to the National Archives after Trump (according to the indictment) personally went through the material.
Understanding that not everything had been returned, the Justice Department obtained a warrant demanding the return of anything with classification markings, regardless of whether they were still classified. Trump failed to do so. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, it found material marked as classified in a storage room and Trump’s office.
None of those subsequent issues are dependent on how the material got to Mar-a-Lago, nor are the issues in the superseding indictment focused on an alleged effort to keep the government from obtaining surveillance footage.
But, again, Kelly’s story is false.
It’s not clear what document she was posting images from; she didn’t link it in her social media posts. There was an excerpt of the interview with Person 10 released last week, but it doesn’t include the discussion of pallets. It does, however, make obvious who was being interviewed: an employee of Trump’s post-presidential office who began working there in July 2021. That employee was at the center of another discovery of documents marked as classified several months after the Mar-a-Lago search.
The interview with Person 10, though, doesn't matter. What matters is why there were pallets of material in Virginia and how they got to Mar-a-Lago. And we already know the answer to that, because The Washington Post reported on it in December 2022.
After Trump (grudgingly) left office, he was allotted funding to run a transition office, a process that involved the GSA. Because he rejected his election loss for so long, his team was slow to set things up. Shortly before Biden was inaugurated, Vice President Mike Pence’s team chose a GSA-managed space in Crystal City for its office. Trump’s team asked whether it could be there, too.
Former presidents are allowed six months of funding for their transitions. So, with a hard deadline of July 21, Trump’s team operated out of the GSA building in Crystal City. One staffer informed the GSA that “as many as 100 boxes of presidential gifts would be stored at the Crystal City office,” The Post reported, based on an email sent to the GSA.
“[T]he Crystal City office was crammed with leftover stuff from the Trump White House with no apparent organization and little knowledge of what was even there,” our report noted.
July 21 arrived, and the Crystal City office still had a bunch of stuff in it. Trump’s staff put material into boxes and boxes on pallets. Two pallets finally arrived at Mar-a-Lago on Sept. 14. The other four pallets (including two that had been repacked after a pallet became oversized) went to a nearby storage facility.
In requesting material to pack up Crystal City, Trump staffer Desiree Thompson Sayle asked for 30 bankers’ boxes, the small white boxes featured in photos in the Trump indictment. There were also 15 small cardboard boxes, 30 medium-size ones and 10 large ones. The pallets that ended up at Mar-a-Lago were a mix of these types of boxes.
Compare this with Kelly’s presentation. These were not obviously “the boxes that ended up containing papers with ‘classified markings,' ” though some may have been. Regardless, the material in Crystal City was not held or managed by the GSA; instead, it was material that was part of Trump’s post-presidential office. Trump also brought several boxes directly to Mar-a-Lago after he left office.
Interestingly, a member of Trump’s team provided a letter to the GSA (at the agency’s request) attesting that “the items being shipped from Arlington, VA to Palm Beach, FL are required to wind down the Office of the Former President or are items that are property of the Federal Government” — stipulations required for the move to be paid for by transition funds.
During Trump’s trial on Tuesday, he learned that he would be allowed to attend his son Barron’s high school graduation in mid-May. The idea that he was being prevented from doing so ran rampant on the right as his allies attempted to use the issue to disparage the trial and the judge overseeing it. The GSA story can be thought of in the same way. There’s no smoking gun related to the material shipped from Trump’s Crystal City office to Mar-a-Lago. It’s just another unverified rumor that coursed through the right-wing narrative universe before reality could catch up.