When Trump left office in January 2021, it was Mar-a-Lago where he retreated, wounded by a loss he refused to acknowledge. The club, with its paying members and large oil paintings of Trump as a younger man, was a welcome retreat. It was also the destination for dozens of cardboard boxes, hastily packed in the final days of his administration and shipped in white trucks to Florida. People familiar with Trump’s departure from Washington said the packing process was rushed, in part because the outgoing president refused to engage in activities that would mean he had lost the election. When it became clear that he would have to leave the White House, the items were quickly packed into boxes and shipped south without a clearly organized system. “Trump kept a lot of things in his files that weren’t in the normal system or that were given to him during intelligence briefings,” said John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser. “I can easily imagine the last few chaotic days in the White House, since he didn’t think he was going to leave until the last minute, they were just throwing things in boxes and it included a lot of things he had collected. the four years”. A number of boxes, including some containing classified documents, had ended up at the club after Trump’s presidency ended. When federal investigators — including the head of counterintelligence and export control at the Justice Department — traveled to Mar-a-Lago in June to discuss classified documents with Trump and his lawyers, they expressed concern that the room was not properly secured. Trump’s team added a new lock to the door. But FBI agents returned to Mar-a-Lago last week to execute a search warrant on the property that turned up three potential crimes: Espionage Act violations, obstruction of justice and criminal manipulation of government records. Items removed after Monday’s search included a leather box containing documents, photo binders, “various top secret documents” and “Info re. President of France,” according to the search warrant. Trump and his allies have claimed he used his presidential privilege to declassify the documents before leaving office, though they have provided no evidence of a formal process. “My only surprise was that even more wasn’t brought to Mar-a-Lago,” Bolton said.
A habit of defying the rules
Last week was not the first time federal intelligence officials were concerned about how Trump was handling government secrets. Almost as soon as he took office, Trump has shown a willingness to demonstrate protocols for guarding sensitive information. In 2017, he spontaneously disclosed top-secret information about an Islamic State plot to a group of Russian visitors, including the foreign secretary, that the US had received from Israel. It deeply angered the intelligence services of both countries. When he was told by intelligence officials in 2019 about an explosion in Iran, he later tweeted a highly classified satellite photo of the facility — even though he had heard officials worry beforehand that doing so could reveal American capabilities. Trump preferred to receive intelligence briefings electronically, according to his third chief of staff Mick Mulvey, although he sometimes asked to withhold physical documents from classified briefings. “At times the President would say, ‘Can I keep this?’ But we had whole teams of people to make sure that these documents don’t get left behind, they don’t get transferred to the residence. He would use them. That was his right as President of the United States,” Mulvaney said. But monitoring the records was not a priority for Trump, according to several former officials. When he asked to keep sensitive documents, officials sometimes worried about what would happen to the material. When he traveled, aides often followed him behind cardboard boxes where they collected stacks of papers Trump had left behind.
Mixing business with pleasure
At Mar-a-Lago, concerns that Trump had leaked top government secrets — accidentally or not — were heightened. The facility serves as a pool club, spa, restaurant and clubhouse for members and their guests. the Donald J. Trump Gold Ballroom can be rented for weddings and other events.
While the Secret Service screens visitors for weapons and checks their names against a list, it is not responsible for protecting classified documents or protecting against potential interception.
Members flocked to Trump’s club when he was in town as President, and rules established early in his tenure against taking pictures in the dining room were not always strictly enforced.
This was evident in February 2017 when Trump hosted the late then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for dinner on the patio. After a North Korean missile launch interrupted the meal, Trump and Abe huddled with their national security aides in front of other customers, who picked at blue cheese salads while snapping photos of the leaders’ impromptu crisis talks.
Trump aides later insisted that he had entered a secure room – known as the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) – to receive briefings on the launch and that he and Abe were merely discussing logistics for their press statements.
But the flood of photos posted on social media by members of Mar-a-Lago showed the two leaders poring over documents at their table, with aides working on laptops and Trump talking on his cellphone. At one point, employees used the flashlights on their cellphones to illuminate the documents the leaders were reading.
Soon after, some new rules went into effect to limit who could be at the club when Trump was there. Reservations were required two weeks in advance and new limits were placed on the number of guests members were allowed to bring.
Trump returned to the Mar-a-Lago SCIF in the spring of 2017 to discuss launching an air strike on Syria. at the time, he was hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping for dinner. Later, he said he returned to the table to inform Xi of his decision as they ate the “most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you’ve ever seen.”
One of the concerns Trump’s aides had at Mar-a-Lago was their relative inability to discern exactly who he was talking to while there. Compared to the White House, with its strict access lists, it was sometimes unclear even to Trump’s top advisers who he would interact with at the club.
Trump’s second chief of staff, John Kelly, worked to limit who had access to Trump at Mar-a-Lago, though there was no hope that he or any other aide could completely cut off the President’s conversations with friends and to pay Mar-a. -Lago members. Kelly told aides at the time that he was more interested in finding out who Trump was talking to than preventing the talks from taking place.
Kelly also worked to implement a more structured system for handling classified material, although Trump’s cooperation in the system was not always guaranteed.
Managing a variety of risks
While at Mar-a-Lago, Trump did not always use his SCIF when viewing classified documents, according to a person familiar with the matter. And his tendency to share what he knew with his interlocutors was a source of constant frustration. “He’s been a difficult president to support in terms of trying to give him the information he needs while protecting the way we collected it so he doesn’t speak by mistake or otherwise and report something that an opponent could use.” to identify where we had an agent,” said Douglas London, a former CIA counterterrorism official who served during the Trump administration. London said it was ironic Trump kept classified documents, as the former president was “not much of a reader”. Keeping information secret from Mar-a-Lago members was one thing. Removing potential security threats proved to be its own challenge. In 2019, a 33-year-old businesswoman from Shanghai was arrested for trespassing at Trump’s club. At the time of her arrest, Yujing Zhang was in possession of four mobile phones, a laptop, an external hard drive and a thumb drive. Prosecutors said they also found a cache of additional electronics — including a signal detector to detect hidden cameras — and thousands of dollars in cash in her hotel room. Another Chinese national, Lu Jing, was also charged with trespassing at Mar-a-Lago later that year. Officials said that during the incident, Lu was asked to leave by security before returning to the facility and taking pictures. It was never determined what the two women’s motives were in trying to gain access to the club. Lu was found not guilty. Zhang was eventually sentenced to eight months in prison.
