* Multiple parties, including Judicial Watch, moved the Florida court to unseal the filings related to the search warrant. The magistrate gave the government until close of business on Monday to respond. In effect, Garland said today that DOJ will accede to these motions and unseal the records. It remains to be seen how informative they will be.
* President Trump, like other presidents before him, took files with him when he left the White House. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this. The Presidential Records Act, passed in 1978, says that the official records of a president are public property and belong to the National Archives. But a president can take with him, when he leaves office, personal papers as well as–a point that I haven’t seen made–copies of documents, as long as they are marked as such and he leaves a copy for the Archives.
* Trump, like prior presidents, has negotiated with the National Archives about the materials he took with him. Earlier this year, he sent 15 boxes to the Archives. Subsequently, it is reported that representatives of the Archives came to Mar-a-Lago to review approximately 15 more boxes that Trump still had in his basement. While they were doing the review, Trump came downstairs to greet them. I don’t think the contents of those boxes, the apparent target of the search warrant, are a mystery to the Archives or to DOJ. Maybe they were hoping to discover something new in Melania’s closets.
* The DOJ, in its many press leaks, mostly to its in-house media organ the New York Times, keeps talking about classified information. This is because no penalty attaches to violation of the Presidential Records Act. The Biden administration has to allege the commission of a crime, and that most likely explains its references to classified information.
* I have no idea whether classified information is included in the 15 boxes that Trump has in his basement or not. It wouldn’t be surprising. The serious criminal statutes on classified information relate to passing it on to, say, the Russians or Chinese. As far as we know, there is no suggestion that Trump gave classified information to anyone. He was perfectly entitled to know it and to view it himself; the issue is that he may have taken it to an unauthorized location, i.e., Mar-a-Lago. Until now, this has generally not been considered a serious offense. Sandy Berger is an exception, although he got a slap on the wrist. But in his case, the point was that he stole a document from the Archives, apparently something damaging to the Clinton administration, so as to delete it from the historical record. There is no such suggestion, as far as we know, with regard to Trump.
