Christian Smith
(The Hill) – Additional confidential records were discovered in former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago bedroom following the FBI’s search of his Florida estate, court records filed Tuesday reveal.
The detail is buried in proceedings arising from a separate legal battle, as Trump asks a judge to dismiss his prosecution for prosecutorial misconduct, revealing for the first time many of the records at stake as prosecutors presented their case to a grand jury. A.D.
This includes a ruling by Judge Beryl Howell, who oversaw those proceedings, indicating that Trump was subpoenaed again in January 2023, prompting his lawyers to later hand over a “near-empty folder marked ‘Rated Summary of the Night.’”
She expressed disbelief about how Trump could be unaware of the confidential records still in his home long after the search of his property in August 2022.
“Notably, no excuse is provided as to how the former president could lose classified classified documents found in his own room at Mar-a-Lago,” Howell wrote.
It’s another notable detail in a case in which confidential records were found in several locations that alarmed prosecutors, including a dance stage and even a bathroom.
The newly revealed opinion follows a push by special counsel Jack Smith to secure more testimony from Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran, along with 88 pages of his own records, which he said are protected by attorney-client privilege.
Howell spends a lot of time analyzing Trump’s legal culpability, including the obstruction of justice charges that would accompany those for deliberately withholding confidential records.
She also reflects on her role in withholding information from her lawyer and encouraging her now-co-defendant Walt Nauta to return the storage boxes they moved to hide them from Corcoran without being caught on camera.
“The administration has asked that this rush to Mar-a-Lago after the June 24, 2022 phone call reflect the former president’s perception that the removal of the boxes from storage before the search was caught on camera – and his attempts to ensure that any subsequent movement of the boxes back to the warehouse could occur off-camera,” she wrote.
“This theory is supported by the curious absence of any video showing the return of the remaining boxes to the warehouse.”
In a superseding indictment, the DOJ accused Trump of ordering the deletion of the footage, one of 41 different charges he faced in the case.
Howell later notes that Trump’s role in encouraging Corcoran to provide a certification to the government that all records had been returned was “a representation that the former president… knew to be wrong.”
Howell also explained his rationale for suspending the attorney-client privilege, noting that “the criminal fraud exception punctures the attorney-client privilege even when the lawyer is an unknown tool to his client.”
The opinion was shared as an exposition by Trump’s legal team, although it appears to favor Smith’s position, showing how Howell agreed that prosecutors demonstrated that the former president’s conduct met the elements of each law he was later accused of violating.
The matter is now before Judge Aileen Cannon, who is still considering this motion and several others asking her to dismiss the case.
However, she indefinitely postponed Trump’s trial, refusing to set a new trial date in an order earlier this month, while detailing that she needed more time to evaluate each of the former president’s motions.
