New York Times: “Mr. Trump and his allies have cast the search as a partisan assault while amplifying conflicting arguments about the handling of sensitive documents and failing to answer a question at the center of the federal investigation: Why was he keeping documents, some still marked classified, at an unsecured Florida resort when officials had sought for a year to retrieve them?” “The often contradictory and unsupported defenses perpetuated by Mr. Trump and his team since the F.B.I. search follow a familiar playbook of the former president’s. He has used it over decades but most visibly when he was faced with the investigation into whether his campaign in 2016 conspired with Russians and during his first impeachment trial.” “In both instances, he claimed victimization and mixed some facts with a blizzard of misleading statements or falsehoods. His lawyers denied that he had tied his administration’s withholding of vital military aid to Ukraine to Mr. Trump’s desire for investigations into Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, Hunter Biden.”
Former President Trump called on the FBI to return the documents seized from his estate in Mar-a-Lago, claiming some of them to be privileged, attorney-client material, The Hill reports. There is no indication that agents seized any non-governmental documents. Daniel Dale: “Responding to FBI search, Trump and allies return to his familiar strategy: flood the zone with nonsense.”
Why Did Trump Take Classified Documents? Timothy O’Brien: “Reason One seems relatively harmless. Trump is a seven-year-old grown old, and he liked some of the cool doodads you get your hands on as president… Among the disputed documents at Mar-a-Lago was a meteorological map of Hurricane Dorian that he had infamously marked up with a black Sharpie. Who knows why that map was so important to him? Who cares?” “The second and third reasons aren’t harmless at all. They’re deeply damaging and troubling.” “So, Reason Two: Money. Unfettered greed has motivated Trump his entire life… Recall that Trump’s businesses have been in difficult straits. When Trump left the White House, his operations were saddled with about $1 billion in debt, $900 million of which comes due relatively soon. He personally guaranteed repayment of about $421 million of that debt.” “Reason Three: Reputational damage… it’s not unreasonable to worry that his communications with foreign leaders — and anything disreputable or possibly illegal that took place in connection with those — could have been something he felt compelled to hide.”