Somebody at the Wall Street Journal got a peek at the list of stuff the FBI took from Mar-a-Lago on Monday:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation agents took around 20 boxes of items, binders of photos, a handwritten note and the executive grant of clemency for Mr. Trump’s ally Roger Stone, a list of items removed from the property shows....The list includes references to one set of documents marked as “Various classified/TS/SCI documents,” an abbreviation that refers to top-secret/sensitive compartmented information. It also says agents collected four sets of top secret documents, three sets of secret documents, and three sets of confidential documents. The list didn’t provide any more details about the substance of the documents.
Huh. That sounds harmless, doesn't it? And anyway, as Trump said, “The government could have had whatever they wanted, if we had it.”
I've avoided commenting on this whole fiasco since we have so little real information about what's going on, but I have to admit it's fascinating. Did Trump just gather up random stuff and take it with him without looking at it? Did he consider nuclear protocols and whatnot to be great keepsakes? Beats me. Even by Trump standards this is really hard to make sense of.
You can break it down into 2 Trump categories. 1. Things I didn’t want people to see (IE clemency notes) and 2. Stuff I think would be cool to show people because, you know, President.
There is a monetary value in selling secrets to his buddies abroad
"Did Trump just gather up random stuff and take it with him without looking at it?"
If the materials recovered included TS/SCI documents, hardly likely. These are documents that, for the most part, never leave the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) in which they are stored. I suppose that a sitting POTUS could order such materials brought to the WH, but there would have been a national security official chaperoning the documents from the SCIF to the WH and back again. If they were left unattended anywhere other than the SCIF that would have been a huge security breach. And the person who requested the documents would have to be considered a responsible party.