Federal prosecutors released new photos Monday in Donald Trump’s classified documents case that they argued show the former president allegedly stored the sensitive information in a “haphazard manner.”
The pictures, taken by the FBI and one of Trump’s co-defendants in the case, were released by prosecutors as part of an effort to dismiss the defense team’s claim that the 45th president’s due process rights were violated.
The photos appear to show classified and confidential White House documents mixed in boxes with the 78-year-old former president’s clothing and keepsakes from his time in the Oval Office.
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team argued that Trump stored boxes containing sensitive documents in a “haphazard manner” and the material inside them – including shirts, shoes, photographs, magazines, newspapers, greeting cards, binders, Christmas ornaments and correspondence – “had no apparent organization whatsoever.”
Smith’s filing in the US District Court for the the Southern District of Florida came in response to a motion by Trump’s legal team to dismiss the 40-count indictment against the presumptive Republican nominee for president over the alleged failure by federal investigators to keep the documents intact and the order in which they were found in the boxes.
Trump’s lawyers argue that the FBI destroyed “exculpatory evidence” by rearranging the material in the boxes as they sifted through them after an August 2022 raid of the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
“Against this backdrop of the haphazard manner in which Trump chose to maintain his boxes, he now claims that the precise order of the items within the boxes when they left the White House was critical to his defense,” prosecutors wrote in the filing.
Smith’s team argued that while the exact order of the material in each box may not have been documented, FBI agents maintained “box-to-box integrity.”
“This is not a case where reams of identically-sized documents were stacked neatly in file folders or redwelds, arrayed perfectly within a box,” prosecutors wrote.
Along with FBI photos, prosecutors included photos taken by Trump aide and co-defendant Walt Nauta in December 2021 of toppled boxes and papers strewn out on the floor of a Mar-a-Lago storage room, to further the government’s claim that Trump was not keeping them in any particularly important order.
The government said the contents of the boxes indicate that they clearly belonged to the former president because they contained items “valuable only to Trump.”
More than 100 documents bearing classified markings, including some containing national defense information, were found in the boxes by the FBI, according to Smith.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges in the case.
