How to abscond with classified documents and not be arrested

Four days before the end of the Trump presidency, a White House aide peered into the Oval Office and was startled, if not exactly surprised, to see all of the president’s personal photos still arrayed behind the Resolute Desk as if nothing had changed — guaranteeing the final hours would be a frantic dash mirroring the prior four years.

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Papers he had accumulated in his last several months in office had been dropped into boxes, roughly two dozen of them, and not sent to the National Archives. Aides had even retrieved letters from Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, and given them to Mr. Trump in the final weeks.

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Although the White House Counsel’s Office had told Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s last chief of staff, that the roughly two dozen boxes worth of material in the residence needed to be turned over to the archives, at least some of those boxes, including those with the Kim letters and some documents marked highly classified, were shipped to Florida. There they were stored at various points over the past 19 months in different locations inside Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s members-only club, home and office.

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This month, prosecutors obtained a warrant to search Mar-a-Lago for remaining materials, including some related to sensitive national security matters. The investigation is active and expanding, according to recent court filings, as prosecutors look into potentially serious violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice.

  NYT

And we don't know which instances of obstruction, beyond attempting to get back the documents Trump should not have in his possession, they're expecting to have evidence for.

Mr. Meadows assured aides that the harried packing up of the White House would follow requirements about the preservation of documents, and he said he would make efforts to ensure that the administration complied with the Presidential Records Act, according to people familiar with those conversations.

But as the clock ticked down, Mr. Trump focused on pushing through last-minute pardons and largely ignored the transition he had tried to forestall.

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From his first hours in office, Mr. Trump had always taken a proprietary view of the presidency, describing government documents and other property — even his staff — as his own personal possessions.

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[In reality, under] the Presidential Records Act, the law that strictly governs the handling of records generated in the Oval Office, every document belonged to taxpayers. Whether the materials were national security briefings, reams of unclassified documents automatically uploaded to a secure server in Pennsylvania or notes that Mr. Trump routinely ripped up or flushed down the toilet — all were government property to be assessed and, in most cases, transferred as part of the nation’s history to the National Archives.

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Mr. Trump’s lawyers and aides were well versed in the records act, even if Mr. Trump routinely flouted it. Donald F. McGahn II, Mr. Trump’s first White House counsel, instituted a protocol for the proper handling of materials and gave presentations on the law to staff members, former officials said. After the 2020 election, White House officials held conversations about the fact that someone needed to retrieve documents that Mr. Trump had accumulated in the residence over many months.

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By the end of the administration, the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, and his deputy, Patrick F. Philbin, were keenly aware that Mr. Trump’s handling of documents was a potential problem.

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Mr. Meadows’s immediate predecessors in that role — President Barack Obama’s last chief of staff, Denis McDonough, and President George W. Bush’s final chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten — had created teams to scrub West Wing offices of anything that belonged to the archives and made the stewardship of government records a priority. It is unclear whether Mr. Meadows took the same measures, former aides said. But in the administration’s final weeks, the White House emailed all of its offices detailed instructions about returning documents and cleaning out their spaces.

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Mr. Meadows also assured White House staff members that he would talk

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[B]y early 2021, after Mr. Trump had left the White House, officials with the archives realized they were missing significant material.

They reached out to, among others, Scott Gast, who had been a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office under Mr. Trump, and Mr. Philbin. The two men, along with Mr. Meadows and four other Trump officials, had been appointed by Mr. Trump on his last full day in office to work with the National Archives.

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The archivists were particularly insistent about getting back the missing correspondence from the North Korean leader and a letter left on the Resolute Desk for Mr. Trump by Mr. Obama, both of significant historical value.

Archives officials also asked Mr. Gast and Mr. Philbin about the roughly two dozen boxes that had been in the residence during the Trump administration’s final days. Mr. Philbin responded that he would work to get them in the hands of the archives and reached out to Mr. Meadows, who said he would help make it happen.

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But archives officials did not get what they wanted until they traveled to Mar-a-Lago and retrieved 15 boxes of material in January 2022. Subsequently, archives officials told Mr. Trump’s team that they had identified social media records that had not been preserved, and that they had learned White House staff members had not preserved official business they had conducted on their personal electronic messaging accounts.

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In the spring, both Mr. Philbin and Mr. Gast were questioned by the F.B.I. about the boxes; Mr. Cipollone was also interviewed at some point. A grand jury was formed.

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In June, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers signed a statement asserting that all relevant documents with classified markings from the boxes that had been requested — by then they were stored in a basement area at Mar-a-Lago — had been returned. The Justice Department would later file a detailed affidavit to a federal judge in Florida, revealing that the department believed possible crimes had been committed, precipitating the search on Aug. 8 at the club.

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None of [the] documents or any other materials pertaining to the Russia investigation were believed to be in the cache of documents recovered by the F.B.I. during the search of Mar-a-Lago.

Somebody's ass - or somebodies' asses - will soon be in a sling.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.