On Monday afternoon, CNN published an interview with a former Mar-a-Lago employee that bolsters one of the lingering possibilities surrounding Trump’s action: that he may still have documents at one of his other properties.
You will recall that the FBI’s 2022 search for documents was limited to Trump’s Palm Beach estate. The FBI gathered scores of documents from a storage room near the pool and from Trump’s personal office.
It was the third tranche of documents the government had recovered.
After grudgingly leaving the White House in January 2021, Trump moved to Mar-a-Lago, bringing with him a number of documents and mementos that he helped pack up. He also oversaw the return of a number of boxes of material to the National Archives, allegedly returning 15 of more than 70 boxes he’d brought to Mar-a-Lago.
The Archives found material marked as classified among the contents of the boxes and alerted the Justice Department. This led to the issuance of a federal subpoena for any material marked as classified. In early June 2022, attorneys working for Trump handed a Justice Department official a package that they represented was the entirety of the classified or marked-as-classified documents still in Trump’s possession.
That was not true. That August, the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago and found more than 100 more.
It has been understood for some time that the lawyers assembling the package of documents to be handed over in response to the subpoena were not given access to all of the boxes of material. Speaking to CNN, former Mar-a-Lago employee Brian Butler explained that, on the morning the Justice Department arrived to take possession of that package, he helped load boxes into Trump’s plane before the former president left for his home in Bedminster, N.J.
On June 2, the day before the Justice Department arrived, Mar-a-Lago employees including Trump’s valet Walt Nauta moved a number of boxes on the property, transporting more than two dozen to Trump’s residence before the attorneys began to search for responsive material.
Then, on June 3, Nauta reached out to Butler, who was in charge of vehicles at Mar-a-Lago.
“Walt had came up to me, and asked me if he could use one of our Escalades,” Butler told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “Since I ran the car service, I pretty much kept control over the vehicles. I had loaded a bunch of the family luggage into a minivan, and I was just going to drive it to the plane, load it up, and that’s it.”
Butler saw people he later recognized as Trump’s attorneys at Mar-a-Lago that day. The attorneys handed over the package of material and were allowed to look at the storage room where most of the material was stored. They signed a document attesting that no other material existed.
That same day, Butler headed to the airport to load the Trumps’ private plane for the flight to New Jersey. Nauta had already left, Butler told Collins, and had asked to be updated when Butler was on his way. He was waiting “at a nearby business,” Butler said.
“I texted him, hey, I’m on my way. He followed me. He pulled out and got behind me,” Butler told Collins. “We got to the airport. I ended up loading all the luggage I had. And he had a bunch of boxes.”
“You noticed that he had boxes?” Collins asked.
“Oh, yes, they were the boxes that were in the indictment,” Butler replied. “The white Bankers Boxes? That’s what I remember loading.”
Butler helped load those boxes, between 10 to 15 of them, onto the plane. He told Collins that he never saw them come back.
It is not necessarily the case that those boxes included classified material, certainly. But remember the context: This is the moment at which Trump’s attorneys were turning material over to the government that they’d plucked out of a subset of the boxes in Trump’s possession. Perhaps the movement on June 2 was simply about moving unrelated material to New Jersey when the Trumps left. Or perhaps material was transferred to Bedminster.
We know that there was probably at least one classified document at Bedminster after Trump left office: the one he had with him in 2021 when he was speaking to writers working on a book for his former chief of staff Mark Meadows. That document, mentioned by Trump in a recording that was later published by CNN, purportedly involved military plans. CBS News reported in June that the document was not among those mentioned in Trump’s later indictment. His lawyers indicated that they were unable to find any such document.
His lawyers had conducted a general search of Bedminster for any classified material in December 2022, without success. Perhaps this was because there were no classified documents on the property. Or, as was the case at Mar-a-Lago the prior June, they simply weren’t given the chance to look in the places where the documents were kept.
That’s the fundamental divide we’re asked to consider. Is it a coincidence that boxes were moved prior to the arrival of attorneys looking for classified material and that, the next day, boxes were flown to Bedminster? Or might Trump have lost that benefit of the doubt at some point over the past few years?
There’s one other element of the Butler interview worth mentioning. Some time later, he was speaking to a friend and colleague, Carlos De Oliveira. Last year, De Oliveira was added to the original indictment targeting Trump and Nauta. Butler said that he and De Oliveira were discussing the classified documents case when De Oliveira said, “You know, we’re all dirty, we all move boxes.”
Butler replied that the only time he’d moved boxes was to load them on the plane.
