Unanswered in Indictment’s Details on Trump’s Hoarding of Documents: Why?
The charging document offers some possible hints but does not establish that the former president had a goal beyond simply possessing the material.
Written by Maggie Haberman and Alan Feuer
June 10, 2023
For all the detailed evidence laid out in the 38-count indictment accusing former President Donald J. Trump of holding onto hundreds of classified documents and then obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them, one mystery remains: Why did he take them and fight so hard to keep them?
Mr. Trump’s motive for having thousands of presidential records — including more than 300 classified documents — at Mar-a-Lago, his combination residence and members-only club in Palm Beach, Fla., was not addressed directly in the 49-page indictment filed on Thursday in Miami. The charging document did not establish that Mr. Trump had a broader goal beyond simply possessing the material.
While finding a motive could certainly be useful for prosecutors should Mr. Trump end up at trial, it may not be necessary in proving the legal elements of the case against him. Nonetheless, why Mr. Trump held onto an extensive collection of highly confidential documents and then, prosecutors say, schemed to avoid returning them remains an unanswered question — even after nearly 15 months of investigation by the Justice Department.
The indictment did offer some hints.
It described how Mr. Trump, who views most everything in terms of leverage and often focuses on payback against perceived enemies, brandished a classified “plan of attack” against Iran at a meeting in July 2021 at Bedminster, his golf club in New Jersey, as a way to rebut what he perceived to be criticism from Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In a recording of the meeting, Mr. Trump can be heard rustling paper and telling those around him that the document in question proved that he was right in his dispute with General Milley.
“This totally wins my case, you know,” he said.
In other instances in the indictment, an aide to Mr. Trump describes the materials he was carting around with him in the boxes as “his papers,” something he did while he was president, suggesting he was not ready to let go of the perks of holding the highest office in the country.
Takeaways From Trump’s Indictment in the Documents Case
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New revelations. The 49-page indictment against Donald Trump and a personal aide, Walt Nauta, revealed a host of potentially devastating new details in the Justice Department’s inquiry into the former president’s mishandling of classified documents. Here are some of the most significant allegations:
There was a stunning pattern of obstruction. Prosecutors say Trump willfully ignored a May 2022 subpoena requiring him to return the documents — and took extraordinary steps to obstruct investigators. The indictment details how Nauta, at Trump’s direction, moved 64 boxes of documents so that Trump’s lawyer could not find them.
Boxes of documents were stored in a bathroom. In April 2021, Trump’s employees needed to move dozens of boxes from a ballroom at his Mar-a-Lago estate. “There is still a little room in the shower where his other stuff is,” one aide texted another. The boxes were hauled to a small bathroom and piled up nearly to the tiny chandelier next to the toilet.
Documents were stored sloppily. The indictment shows a picture of a box of top secret national security documents that in 2021 had spilled onto the floor of a Mar-a-Lago storage room accessible to many of the resort’s employees.
Trump made a “plucking motion.” The indictment recounts how Trump and his lawyer discussed what to do with a folder of 38 documents with classification markings. The lawyer said Trump made a “plucking motion” that implied, “why don’t you take them with you to your hotel room and if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.”
Trump was recorded sharing secrets. The indictment says Trump was recorded at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., showing off secret U.S. battle plans to a writer. Trump described the material as “highly confidential” and “secret,” while admitting it had not been declassified.
Trump showed a secret map to a staff member. In August or September 2021, Trump shared a top secret military map with a staff member at his political action committee who did not have a security clearance; he warned the person not to “get too close.”
One of Trump’s lawyers is a key witness. Some of the most potentially damning evidence against the former president came from notes made by one of his lawyers, M. Evan Corcoran. The lawyer’s notes essentially gave prosecutors a road map to building their case.
In a similar fashion, the indictment depicts Mr. Trump as trying to stop a lawyer he hired to help him search Mar-a-Lago for any classified material still in his possession from actually going through the records he kept at the property.
“I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes,” Mr. Trump is quoted as saying, expressing a kind of personal ownership over the material. “I really don’t.”
His sense of personal ownership was so pervasive that his aides, in text messages included in the indictment, were plainly anxious about moving them too far away from him.
Several former aides and advisers to Mr. Trump have long made the argument that he simply kept the sensitive records because he saw them as “mine,” and because he likes acquiring trophies that he can show off, whatever form those trophies may take.
When he was a businessman showing off as a playboy in Manhattan, Mr. Trump tried to be seen with attractive women. He bought the Plaza Hotel and called it a “toy” for his wife at the time, Ivana.
He collected high-end trinkets to brandish for visitors to his 26th-floor office, like the basketball star Shaquille O’Neal’s giant sneaker, which lay with a pile of other items.
He treated the nation’s secrets similarly while in office. Mr. Trump shared highly classified intelligence during an Oval Office meeting in 2017 with the Russian ambassador and foreign minister. He posted a classified photo on Twitter in 2019 of a failed Iranian rocket launch, telling senior aides who wanted to remove the classification markings that that was the “sexy part.”
During their investigation of the case, prosecutors working for the special counsel Jack Smith took steps that indicated they were hunting for a motive.
For instance, they subpoenaed information about business dealings that Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, had with seven foreign countries from the time his presidency began in 2017, appearing to try to determine whether any of the documents could have been used to aid his ventures abroad. But there was no reference in the indictment to Mr. Trump using the documents for business deals.
Late last year, as public reports made clear that prosecutors believed Mr. Trump still had classified material in his possession, one of Mr. Trump’s friends-turned-adversaries, Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, offered a simple explanation.
“I think it’s much more likely they’re a trophy that he walks around and says, look, I’ve got this,” Mr. Christie, who is now campaigning for president against Mr. Trump in the Republican primary, told ABC News. “I’ve got this classified document or that, because remember something: He can’t believe he’s not president.”
Mr. Christie went on, “He can’t believe he still doesn’t get these documents, and he needs to display to everybody down at Mar-a-Lago or up in Bedminster during the summer he still has some of those trappings.”
He suggested it was why Mr. Trump had a reproduction of the Oval Office Resolute Desk put into his office at Mar-a-Lago.
“All the rest of those things are things that are assuaging, you know, his disappointment and his disbelief that he’s not the president anymore,” he said.
Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent and the author of “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.” She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. @maggieNYT
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence. He joined The Times in 1999. @alanfeuer
Arraignment: On June 13, Trump and Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed to investigate the former president, found themselves 20 feet from each other for a 50-minute courtroom encounter unlike any other in the country’s history.
Trump’s Legal Strategy: Trump and his lawyers have already tested several defenses to challenge his indictment, but their arguments could be hard to sustain in court.
Espionage Act Cases: The former president was charged under a 100-year-old law that has been used to prosecute spies and leakers. Earlier cases have ended in prison sentences.
New Restrictions: Trump and Walt Nauta, his personal aide who was charged as a co-conspirator, were ordered by a federal magistrate judge to not discuss their case. That could be quite challenging for them.
The Judge: Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who showed favor to him earlier in the investigation, will wield sweeping power over the case’s tempo and what evidence to allow or exclude.
“If you want to get to President Trump, you are going to have go through me, and you are going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me,” said Kari Lake, the Republican former candidate for governor of Arizona. “And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the N.R.A.”
A version of this article appears in print on June 11, 2023, Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: Unanswered in the Indictment: Why Did Trump Hoard Documents?.
Jon Cherry for The New York Times
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Our Coverage of the Trump Documents Case
The Justice Department has filed federal criminal charges against former President Donald Trump over his mishandling of classified documents.
A Historic Indictment: Federal prosecutors said that Trump put national security secrets at risk by mishandling classified documents and schemed to block the government from reclaiming the material. “The Daily” looks at the evidence.
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