The government has filed their response to Trump’s argument that, because some of the contents of Trump’s boxes have shifted during the investigation, the entire indictment must be dismissed. I’ll do a long post describing what new details it reveals of Trump’s hoarding and of the investigation.
For now, I wanted to point to a fragment of an interview report (302) from someone who might be one of Trump’s White House valets. The witness repeated a point made by other loyal Trump staffers: They joked about Trump’s obsession being akin to that in My Beautiful Mind.
The witness described that one time, after Derek Lyons instructed the witness to go search Trump’s boxes for something, Trump knew things were out of place.
[Person 81]: There were conversations — like, he knew which ones had what in them. We had conversations with the Staff Secretary for us to, quote, go into the boxes and get things out. So he wanted us to go shuffle through the boxes —
Mr. Raskin: He the Staff —
[Person 81]: The Staff Secretary.
Mr. Raskin: [Person 45] or [Derek Lyons].
[Person 81]: [Lyons] was the one that informed me to do it. Go through, shuffle through, see what we could find about schedules, specific documents that they had, which I can’t remember off hte top of my head exactly what those were, but find specific documents and pull those out and then give them to them so that they could have them —
Mr. Raskin: And did you do that?
[Person 81]: — for tracking purposes.
Mr. Raskin: And you said [Lyons] wanted you to do it; did you do it?
[Person 81]: We only did that — I did that one time and the President realized that it happened and I told [Lyons] that I won’t do that again because I don’t want the President to think that I was snooping through his stuff.
But the more interesting detail is that Person 81 described how there was a cluster of boxes right next to Trump’s bed at the White House.
So if you walk into the room, his bed — there’s a nightstand, his bed, and then there’s, like, a — where another nightstand was but nobody ever slept on that side of the bed usually so he would have it all full of boxes.
Now, I get the impetus. Back in the days when most of my reading was still dead tree books, there’d be a stack of them there, next to my side of the bed, maybe two stacks. There are still four or five in-process books on the bookshelf by the bed.
But Trump’s White House aide was describing boxes and boxes of White House documents, including classified documents.
They were right there by the side of the bed because (usually) no one slept on that side of the bed.