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By Ewan Palmer
News Reporter
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Details of how the FBI searched Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home for classified documents have been included in the latest court filings from the former president.
Trump's legal team filed a motion to dismiss the federal charges against the Republican on Monday over the claims the FBI carried out "destruction of important exculpatory evidence" while retrieving sensitive material from Trump's Florida home in August 2022.
The motions argue that Trump was unaware that he had retained classified materials when he left the White House in January 2021, as they were kept in boxes at Mar-a-Lago along with her personal possessions, such as newspaper clippings and letters.
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Trump pleaded not guilty to 40 charges over the allegations he illegally retained the classified materials and then obstructed the federal attempt to retrieve them.
Trump's legal team noted in the filing that Special Counsel Jack Smith's office recently acknowledged that some boxes of evidence were not in their "original, intact" form and may be in a different order from when they were digitally scanned.
The filings also include an attached exhibit that provides precise details on how the FBI carried out its search of Mar-a-Lago nearly two years ago. This includes noting that agents said they temporarily kept potentially sensitive materials on a coffee table and covered them with a sheet to prevent them from being viewed by those without the authority to do so.
The latest motion to dismiss from Trump's team arrives after Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the federal case, rejected the former president's request to have some of the classified documents charges thrown out over apparent bias in the language of the indictment.
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The trial, originally scheduled for May 2024, is on indefinite hold as Cannon rules on a number of legal arguments and hearings connected to the case. The decision means it is almost certain Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, will not appear before a jury to face the 40 charges he is accused of before the election in November.
The latest court documents show details about the FBI's "filter team" and how they searched Mar-a-Lago in August 2022. A filter team is a group of investigators tasked with reviewing seized documents in criminal cases to determine whether any materials are protected by privilege.
Newsweek reached out to the FBI via email for comment.
Their search of the Florida resort began at around 10 a.m. in an area near a kitchen. It contained a storage area with a back-right room enclosed by a storage room with a "gold-painted door" and a padlock.
While they waited for a key to open the storage room, the filter team searched furniture and other items in plain view for classified materials. The team also searched a second-floor office location known as the "45 Office," which had two primary rooms.
One of the rooms, the Ante Room, is only accessible from the stairwell. The 45 Office also contained an adjacent room, known as the "Primary Office" with a single office desk accessible only from the Ante Room, an additional smaller room, and a bathroom.
The filter team discovered what they considered "potentially privileged" materials in the top right drawer of the single desk located in the Primary Office, the documents said.
An FBI agent then applied tape across the drawer and placed a sign indicating that its contents contained potentially privileged information. Around the same time, another agent located a document with classification markings in another drawer on the same desk.
According to the filing, agents also discovered a box containing many documents bearing classification markings but no potentially privileged documents during the search of a closet.
The FBI found no classified documents in the Ante Room. However, some potentially privileged documents were in and near the left-most desk in the Ante Room, located just before the entrance to the Primary Office. These documents include a handwritten note and an affidavit that may have been a draft but were later not seized.
It was later decided "out of an abundance of caution," that the filter team should set these documents aside, the filing said.
Each of these potentially privileged documents was then placed on a coffee table and covered with cover sheets indicating privileged information. The documents were later returned to the area where they were found, and the cover sheets were removed.
During a search of drawers on the left-side desk, the FBI found items, including apparent letters sent between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, which were kept alongside the former president's passports.
The search continued to the Mar-a-Lago storage room, where dozens of boxes containing classified materials were discovered, according to the filing.
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