A federal judge on Friday unsealed a more detailed list of items the FBI confiscated from Mar-a-Lago during an August 8 raid targeting former President Donald Trump.
The 8-page document provides a fuller picture of what agents took from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida resort and residence after leaving the White House, though it still lacks specifics of what numerous documents contained. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon said she would unseal the list during a Thursday court hearing over Trump’s request to appoint a special master to oversee the FBI audit of the cache of documents, records, and other objects.
They took about 33 boxes of materials from Mar-a-Lago after searching the resort for roughly nine hours on August 8. According to the inventory list unsealed Friday, agents removed material from Trump’s office and from a storage room consisting of classified documents and records and more mundane objects such as “clothing/gift” items, books, and printouts of news articles.
One such box of material confiscated from Trump’s office contained two documents marked confidential, 15 documents marked secret, 7 documents marked top secret, and 69 other documents or photos without classification markings. The box also contained 99 magazine or news articles written between January 2017 and October 2018 and dozens of empty folders labeled either “CLASSIFIED” or “Return to Staff Secretary/Miliary [sic] Aide.”
A box taken out of the storage room contained 68 printed and printed-out news or magazine articles, one item of clothing or a gift, one book, and two government documents or photographs without classification markings, according to the list.
Another box contained 1,571 “US Government Documents/Photographs without Classification Markings” alongside four media articles, one document marked classified, one book, and two empty folders labeled “Return to Staff Secretary/Miliary [sic] Aide.”
The list of items does not go into detail other than to note the number and give a basic description of what the item was. In cases such as “Articles of Clothing/Gift Items,” it’s unclear what object the FBI took from Mar-a-Lago.
Trump sued the federal government last week over the FBI raid, asking Cannon to appoint a special master to oversee the FBI’s audit of the items seized in the raid. Trump also asked the judge to order the FBI to return all objects seized that did not fall under the parameters of the search warrant.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) argued against granting Trump’s request in a Tuesday filing to the court. The DOJ said the FBI audit of the materials was already finished and potentially sensitive materials protected under attorney/client privilege had already been separated from the main body of what was seized by the FBI’s privilege review team.
Most of the documents, the DOJ argued, belonged to the U.S. government and Trump had no authority to ask for their return. The DOJ said other objects seized in the raid were covered under the search warrant because of its broad net, which allowed agents to confiscate items found stored with and nearby classified documents.