Legal experts have been urging officials to search former President Donald Trump’s estate in New Jersey’s Bedminster following recent reports that Trump had made his Mar-a-Lago employees move classified documents before the FBI retrieved the files from his home.
On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that the former president had informed staff at his estate that they needed to move certain boxes full of documents into a Mar-a-Lago storage room in June 2022. This was after the documents were subpoenaed last May, but before the FBI had arrived on-site to get access to the material.
John Irving, a lawyer representing one of the two employees that had been told to move the boxes, has claimed that the employees did not know what the boxes contained and that they were just assisting valet driver Walt Nauta. According to a previous report Trump had ordered Nauta to move documents containing boxes to a storage room in the estate after he had received the subpoena for the classified materials.
Reportedly, Irving also stated that one of the employees had also claimed to help Nauta pack an SUV “when former president Trump left for Bedminster for the summer.” In June 2022, Trump’s legal team had explicitly blocked the FBI from going into that storage room. The FBI proceeded to raid the former President’s home in August 2022. During this search, they were able to locate and seize more than 100 classified documents of varying degrees of classification. Some of those documents were located in that storage room.
