Now trying to get others to take the fall for him? Either way, he still had many months to return the document IF that is what indeed happened.
The boxes with classified info found at Mar-a-Lago may have ended up there because White House aides were secretly packing while Trump insisted he wouldn't have to leave
- In the chaos after the 2020 election, White House aides were secretly packing Trump's boxes.
- Classified materials may have made their way to Mar-A-Lago amidst the kerfuffle.
- Ex-Trump officials told the New York Times they didn't recall ever seeing classified material going into boxes.
Aides to then-President Donald Trump were frantically and secretly packing the president's things behind his back at the end of his presidency because Trump insisted he wouldn't be leaving the White House after the 2020 election,
per a report by the New York Times.
It's the latest media reporting about the chaotic transition from the Trump administration to the Biden administration, one that now is at the center of an unprecedented federal criminal investigation of the former president.
According to the Times, the former Trump officials who were interviewed said they didn't recall ever seeing classified material going into boxes. But several of the people said that the packing had to happen in secret "to avoid being ordered to stop by Mr. Trump, who continued to assert that he had won the election."
NBC News reported in August that once Trump realized his time as commander-in-chief was up, he hurriedly stuffed document after document into banker boxes and shipped them to his Palm Beach estate. Politico last month
cited former aides who said the Oval Office and an adjacent private dining room only got packed up the weekend before Trump left the White House.
"In my entire time of briefing President Bush, he asked to keep only one thing, which was a chart of those responsible for 9/11, which he then, when we captured or killed somebody on that list, he would cross off," Michael J. Morell, former deputy director of the C.I.A. and an agency analyst who delivered President George W. Bush's daily intelligence briefing, told the New York Times.