In addition to troves of information marked “secret” and “top secret,” the FBI’s search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida home turned up over 10,000 U.S. government documents and photographs without classification markings, a newly unsealed Justice Department inventory of the seized items shows.
The DOJ court filing, filed under seal earlier this week but unsealed by a judge Friday, also shows investigators found over 40 empty folders with “classified” banners on them at Mar-a-Lago. It’s unclear what happened to the information that had been inside the folders.
They also found almost four dozen empty folders marked “Return to Staff Secretary/Military Aide,” according to the detailed property inventory.
Judge Aileen Cannon ordered the information in the more detailed property receipt to be unsealed during a hearing Thursday on Trump’s request to have a special master review the evidence collected by the FBI in the Aug. 8 search.
At the hearing, Trump’s lawyers suggested the documents were Trump’s personal records and complained that “ongoing negotiations” with the National Archives had “suddenly been transformed into a criminal investigation.”
Lawyers for the Justice Department said all the government documents that were retrieved belong to the White House, not Trump, and then he and his lawyers flouted a subpoena demanding the return of all documents with classification markings.