Trump still isn’t taking the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into the handling of classified documents from his administration well.
In a recent court filing, the Justice Department included an image of classified documents that FBI agents discovered in Trump’s office at Mar-a-Lago during a recent raid of the former president’s southern Florida property, which was conducted as part of the criminal probe. Trump is taking particular offense to how the documents were spread across a floor in the image, although there’s no indication anyone at the Justice Department is trying to claim Trump was the one who put the documents on the floor. The set-up of the picture itself is relatively unremarkable, but Trump keeps freaking out over what it is supposedly doing to his image.
“A lot of people think that when you walk into my office, I have confidential documents or whatever it may be, all declassified, but I had confidential documents spread out all over my floor,” Trump said in a new interview. Who? Who are these people? “Like a slob, like I’m sitting there reading these documents all day long or somebody else would be,” Trump added, furthering his meltdown. “It’s so dishonest when you look at it. And so people were concerned because they said, gee, you know, that’s a strange scene. You look at the floor and you see documents, right? They have cover sheets of documents. No, they put them there, John, and they put them there in a messy fashion. And then they took a picture and they released it to the public. And this is what we’re dealing with, with these people.” Notably, redactions conceal some of the seized documents’ sensitive contents in a publicly available version of the photo. Listen to Trump’s Thursday freak-out below:
Trump this morning: “A lot of people think that when you walk into my office I have confidential documents spread out all over my floor .. like a slob. Like I’m sitting there reading these documents .. They put them there in a messy fashion and they took a picture.” pic.twitter.com/nsXaaYJydG
— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) September 1, 2022
In a Wednesday rant on Truth Social about the image, Trump basically admitted he was harboring the materials — undercutting his own previous, baseless suggestions of potentially planted evidence. “There seems to be confusion as to the “picture” where documents were sloppily thrown on the floor and then released photographically for the world to see, as if that’s what the FBI found when they broke into my home,” Trump said. “Wrong! They took them out of cartons and spread them around on the carpet, making it look like a big “find” for them. They dropped them, not me – Very deceiving…And remember, we could have NO representative, including lawyers, present during the Raid. They were told to wait outside.” In other words, Trump admitted the materials were in “cartons” at Mar-a-Lago, where he has largely resided since leaving office. Trump’s level of frenzied fury over the image would suggest the Justice Department specifically alleged that he put docs on the floor. Nobody at the department seems to have actually done so, however.
