[What would make the same paper-shredding-president opt to keep a
safe with documents that might incriminate him in federal crimes? ]
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WHY DID DOCUMENT-SHREDDING TRUMP HOARD DOCUMENTS?  
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Daniel Strauss
August 11, 2022
The New Republic
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_ What would make the same paper-shredding-president opt to keep a
safe with documents that might incriminate him in federal crimes? _

,

 

For years we’ve known Donald Trump had a unique habit of flushing
documents down the toilet. In the Oval Office, Trump liked to tear up
papers
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he finished reading them, which meant staffers had to literally tape
them back together in some cases. Other documents ended up in a White
House fireplace.

In other words, he’s not much of a record-keeper. So what would make
the same paper-shredding-president opt to keep a safe with contents so
important that it would spur the FBI to crack it open? And on top of
that, documents that might incriminate him in federal crimes?

“What does anybody keep in a safe? You keep things that you want to
keep private. So for example, cash,” said Michael Cohen, the
reformed Trump lawyer-fixer. “I don’t know whether or not it was
actually a safe or [whether] it was just a file cabinet that
locked.”

Whatever it was was controlled by Matt Calamari, then-Trump’s head
of security, Cohen continued. “And in that, I do know specifically
that they used to keep company documents, for example, like
everybody’s NDAs. Things like that in that lock room,” Cohen said.

Barbara Res, a former executive vice president at the Trump
Organization, doesn’t recall specifically whether Trump had a safe
at Trump Tower, but she said it wouldn’t surprise her. Trump, Res
said, would “feel that his safe would be impenetrable.”

Trump, his allies, and his family members, of course, downplayed the
contents of the safe. Since the raid took place, only son Eric Trump
has addressed its contents. He got slightly more specific
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trying to downplay the contents of the safe. The Trump son said, “My
father always kept press clippings.… He had boxes, when he moved out
of the White House.”

Res scoffed at that, saying there’s no way there was something that
pedestrian in there. “I love watching Eric. He’s so—excuse
me—fucking stupid,” Res said. “He kept ‘clippings?’ If Trump
kept clippings, of all his clippings would fill a stadium. And he kept
notes from his … oh, what a crock of shit.”

Don’t think of Trump as a saver, said Michael D’Antonio, author
of _High Crimes: The Corruption, Impunity, and Impeachment of Donald
Trump_. “I actually would think of him as the opposite of a hoarder
as demonstrated by his flushing away and tearing up documents. He is
afraid of evidence,” D’Antonio said. “The only other similarly
paranoid thing that I know he did was hire an armed chauffeur—an off
duty police officer way back when nobody knew who the hell he was.”
For a long time at Trump Tower, D’Antonio added, Trump “apparently
kept a gun in his bedside table.”

“He has guns,” Cohen said. “Whatever you would keep in the safe,
so would he. It’s not like he’s keeping the monkeypox vaccination
in there or anthrax. Let’s not get silly with what’s in there.…
But I would not be shocked if somebody ended up going in there and
finding, maybe, something somebody else may have asked to hold for
him.” 

Federal investigators haven’t responded to frantic Republican calls
to detail exactly what they were looking for. That’s left former law
enforcement officials hesitant to even speculate in detail what the
FBI was looking for specifically.

“It’s really tough to figure out but I think it comes down to the
eccentricity to the figure involved,” former FBI special agent
Dennis Lormel said. “If in fact they opened the safe they had to
have probable cause to open the safe. They couldn’t just open it.
When you’re executing a search warrant in the first place it’s
very intrusive. You have a safe like that I would have to think …
you would have to specify in the warrant that you were going to go
into that safe.”

What is clear is that whatever the FBI felt could be in Trump’s safe
was important enough for Trump to keep it in there, and for the FBI to
carefully executive a search warrant at the property of a former
president—and for a federal judge to approve the search. This is
clearly not, as all of Trump’s loyalists are arguing, just a way to
keep Trump down.

Since the FBI executed its search warrant at Mar-a-Lago Monday, it’s
been unclear exactly what they were looking for. Federal officials
seem to serve the warrant over concerns that Trump did not actually
turn over everything in the 15 boxes
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took to his Florida club when he left the White House. There’s a lot
of speculation, but very little actual knowledge, about what this
destroyer of evidence kept. Those letters between Trump and North
Korean leader Kim Jong-un reportedly were in some of the boxes that
went to Mar-a-Lago.

Since the FBI executed its search warrant Monday, Republicans have
been rabidly denouncing the FBI, demanding that the feds make public
what they were looking for and vowing retribution in the next
Congress. Senator Ted Cruz compared the raid to something Richard
Nixon would do, saying “What Nixon tried to do, Biden has now
implemented: The Biden Admin has fully weaponized DOJ & FBI to target
their political enemies.” Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican member
of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee,
has sent out fundraising emails saying the “FBI is just another arm
of the Corrupt Democrat Party. They’ve weaponized the justice system
and they’re persecuting political rivals.” 

What’s become clear over the past few days is that the FBI doesn’t
plan to budge. Legal experts with whom I spoke and quoted elsewhere
say there’s no sign the FBI and Justice Department conducted this
short of the highest level of care. Republicans have argued that the
federal government is deliberately hiding details of the raid. But
legal experts also say Trump or his legal team could easily publicize
the paperwork they received as part of the warrant anytime they want.

From the minute the raid occurred, Trump has been trying to paint the
seizure as the real malpractice at hand. There’s no credible sign
that what the federal government did was anything besides by the book.
What _is_ clear is that Trump was so compelled to override his usual
habit of destroying evidence in trying to keep something in a safe.
Whatever was in there, Trump clearly knew it was sensitive and was
willing to risk legal jeopardy to keep it.  

_Daniel Strauss [[link removed]] 
[[link removed]]is a staff writer at The New
Republic. @DanielStrauss4 [[link removed]]_

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