WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 05: U.S. President Donald Trump shushes journalists before signing the Paycheck Protection Program Flexibility Act in the Rose Garden at the White House June 05, 2020 in Washington, DC. In the midst of nationwide protests against the death of George Floyd, the U.S. Labor Department announced the unemployment rate fell to 13.3 percent in May, a surprising improvement in the nation’s job market as hiring rebounded faster than economists expected in the wake of the novel coronavirus pandemic. (Image: Getty)
Trump lawyer Timothy Parlatore said that his team has concluded their latest search of the former president’s properties for classified material and have turned what they found over to the Justice Department.
One of the documents handed over by former President Donald Trump‘s team was an empty folder marked “Classified Evening Summary” after the item was subpoenaed by investigators.
“He has one of those landline telephones next to his bed, and it has a blue light on it, and it keeps him up at night. So he took the manilla folder and put it over so it would keep the light down so he could sleep at night,” Parlatore told CNN. “It’s just this folder. It says ‘Classified Evening Summary’ on it. It’s not a classification marking. It’s not anything that is controlled in any way. There is nothing illegal about it.”
Another item that was handed over by Trump’s legal team was a laptop, which contained many documents with classified markings, and had belonged to an aide.
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Parlatore maintained that the aide had no idea that the documents they scanned were classified.
Parlatore’s announcement continues the Trump classified document saga while the Justice Department is attempting to hold the former president in contempt for not complying with the original June 2022 subpoena for all classified documents still in Trump’s possession.
Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach resort, was raided this summer by the FBI, which seized documents that it had ordered be returned.
Parlatore and the rest of Trump’s team was forced to return all other subpoenaed items that were being stored on Trump’s properties.
President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence have since also been caught storing classified documents illegally in their homes, providing Trump and his team a useful political deflection.
While Biden’s team worked with the Justice Department to hand over classified items they discovered without requiring an FBI raid, Parlatore nonetheless conflated the two classified document scandals to defend his client.
“What you’ve seen here and also in the Biden and Pence investigations is that the White House does not have proper procedures for handling classified information. And these documents, when they get packed up and sent out when people leave office, they do keep showing up, if you will,” Parlatore said.
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