Timeline

Sorry to keep harping on this, but I can't seem to focus on anything else, and there are some dumb stories circulating because people aren't paying attention to the timeline (my favorite version of which is the one posted by CNN). And some interesting new stuff is just coming out.

First, the original issue was internal to the National Archives and Records Administration, starting not long after Biden's inauguration, and what tipped them off is kind of endearing: as they were sorting through the Trump administration presidential records doing librarian things, cataloguing and indexing, they were eagerly awaiting just what you or I would: the famous stuff, like the love letters from Kim Jong Un or the weather map Trump had tried to doctor with his Sharpie in the hope of convincing people that he had been right to warn Alabamans to prepare for a storm that was not coming to Alabama.

Only none of it showed up. It was missing. 

So finally in February NARA's general counsel, Gary Stern, contacted one of Trump's lawyer to find out what the problem was, and that was the beginning of the eight months of back-and-forth that led to the Archive's receiving the 15 boxes in January 2022. But when the boxes came, there were a couple of issues: there were the torn-up and taped-together papers, suggesting that Trump had a dangerous proclivity for destroying presidential records, and there was still missing material, documents you'd expect to find knowing the public record (including, I think, the Kim love letters) that they still didn't find; and a new problem, that there were documents that really shouldn't have been there at all, at various levels of security classification, more than 150 of them, as we're told by today's Times. 

The specific nature of the sensitive material that Mr. Trump took from the White House remains unclear. But the 15 boxes Mr. Trump turned over to the archives in January, nearly a year after he left office, included documents from the C.I.A., the National Security Agency and the F.B.I. spanning a variety of topics of national security interest, a person briefed on the matter said.

Mr. Trump went through the boxes himself in late 2021, according to multiple people briefed on his efforts, before turning them over.

Now, as of today, we know a good deal more about what happened next, thanks to John Solomon of all people (Giuliani's fellow fabricator in the Ukraine matter and now employed alongside Kash Patel as Trump's representative in dealings with the National Archives and Records Administration), who has posted a remarkable letter from NARA (this link is not to Solomon because there's no reason to get him more clicks) to Trump lawyers at his "justthenews" website, which explains, among other things, why it took so long to get the FBI working on the matter.

The NARA letter verifies that materials at the highest level of classification were found in the initial 15 boxes—

According to NARA, among the materials in the boxes are over 100 documents with classification markings, comprising more than 700 pages. Some include the highest levels of classification, including Special Access Program (SAP) materials. Access to the materials is not only necessary for purposes of our ongoing criminal investigation, but the Executive Branch must also conduct an assessment of the potential damage resulting from the apparent manner in which these materials were stored and transported

—but getting the material to DOJ and the FBI was not simple, because the Archives are supposed by statute to restrict access to presidential documents for some years after the president's term ends. To make an exception, DOJ must ask the incumbent president (i.e., Biden) to waive his executive privilege, and this took until early April to work out:

NARA informed the Department of Justice about th[e] discovery, which prompted the Department to ask the President to request that NARA provide the FBI with access to the boxes at issue so that the FBI and others in the Intelligence Community could examine them. On April 11, 2022, the White House Counsel’s Office—affirming a request from the Department of Justice supported by an FBI letterhead memorandum—formally transmitted a request that NARA provide the FBI access to the 15 boxes for its review within seven days, with the possibility that the FBI might request copies of specific documents following its review of the boxes.

They informed Trump's people they'd be doing this, and Trump's people responded with a series of requests that they not do it, arguing that Trump's executive privilege was being violated, although ex-presidents really don't have executive privilege, as was thoroughly decided decades ago, in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, 433 U.S. 425 (1977), and this tied them up for a further month. 

So in any event it wasn't until May 12 that the FBI finally got a first chance to look at the stuff and concluded that the 15 boxes did not represent the entire stash. Returning to The Times:

Soon after beginning their investigation early this year [i.e., on May 12], Justice Department officials came to believe there were additional classified documents that they needed to collect. In May, after conducting a series of witness interviews, the department issued a subpoena for the return of remaining classified material, according to people familiar with the episode.

It was in response to that subpoena that Trump's people invited DOJ down to Mar-a-Lago to pick up whatever was left on June 3 in the basement room where two of Trump's lawyers, Corcoran and Bobb, gave them a "sheaf of classified documents", and signed a statement saying that was really all the classified material they had. Which of course turned out to be false, when the DOJ team got back to Washington:

Soon after that visit, investigators, who were interviewing several people in Mr. Trump’s circle about the documents, came to believe that there were other presidential records that had not been turned over, according to the people familiar with the matter.

On June 22, the Justice Department subpoenaed the Trump Organization for Mar-a-Lago’s security footage, which included a well-trafficked hallway outside the storage area, the people said....

While much of the footage showed hours of club employees walking through the busy corridor, some of it raised concerns for investigators, according to people familiar with the matter. It revealed people moving boxes in and out, and in some cases, appearing to change the containers some documents were held in.

And that is what led to the August 8 "raid" (and a second subpoena for more video footage). It's about Trump's unremitting effort to keep as many of these documents as he could (by now it looks like 41 boxes total) out of the hands of their rightful owners, the American people, through stonewalling, subterfuge, and lies, and the question it raises: what did he want them for?

(And a small refinement of what I think in line with the developing timeline: if the collection occurred in two main phases, one before the election when Patel is working with successive corrupt DNIs Grenell and Ratcliffe, sussing out documents he can use against Trump's FBI "enemies", and one after the election when Patel has moved to the Pentagon, when he is extracting documents that incriminate the soon-to-be ex-president, then it's the former that constitute the classified material in the 15 boxes returned in January—after eight months of studying them, the team ultimately came to understand that it wouldn't put Comey and McCabe in jail; and the latter, the stuff that could put Trump in jail, that he clung to desperately until the Bureau came to take them away.)