Donald Trump’s secretary reportedly told investigators that he used the ‘classified’ documents which he brought home from the White House like scrap paper.
According to ABC News she claimed that Trump would write notes to her on the back of these papers as if they were scrap:
This is big — Trump secretary Molly Michael told federal investigators that Trump wrote her notes – to-do lists! – on the back of documents marked classified, using the documents as if they were scrap paper, according to sources familiar with her statements.…
— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) September 18, 2023
One of former President Donald Trump’s long-time assistants told federal investigators that Trump repeatedly wrote to-do lists for her on documents from the White House that were marked classified, according to sources familiar with her statements.
As described to ABC News, the aide, Molly Michael, told investigators that — more than once — she received requests or taskings from Trump that were written on the back of notecards, and she later recognized those notecards as sensitive White House materials — with visible classification markings — used to brief Trump while he was still in office about phone calls with foreign leaders or other international-related matters.
The notecards with classification markings were at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate when FBI agents searched the property on Aug. 8, 2022 — but the materials were not taken by the FBI, according to sources familiar with what Michael told investigators.
When Michael, who was not present for the search, returned to Mar-a-Lago the next day to clean up her office space, she found the documents underneath a drawer organizer and helped transfer them to the FBI that same day, sources told ABC News.
The sources said Michael also told federal investigators that last year she grew increasingly concerned with how Trump handled recurring requests from the National Archives for the return of all government documents being kept in boxes at Mar-a-Lago — and she felt that Trump’s claims about it at the time would be easy to disprove, according to the sources.
Sources said that after Trump heard the FBI wanted to interview Michael last year, Trump allegedly told her, “You don’t know anything about the boxes.”
Michaels ended up resigning last year after Trump refused to comply with the feds:
As ABC News previously reported, Michael is believed to be the person identified in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment as “Trump Employee 2,” described in the indictment as someone who handled many of Trump’s White House-era boxes at Mar-a-Lago and who provided Trump with photos of those boxes that were then included in the indictment.
A Trump spokesperson said that what ABC News was told — through what the spokesperson called “illegal leaks” — lacks “proper context and relevant information,” and that “President Trump did nothing wrong, has always insisted on truth and transparency, and acted in a proper manner, according to the law.”
In 2018, Michael became Trump’s executive assistant in the White House, and she continued to work for him when Trump left office. But she resigned last year, in the wake of Trump’s alleged refusal to comply with the federal requests and the FBI’s subsequent search of Mar-a-Lago.
They may get Trump on obstruction, but at the end of the day the big question is whether the documents were classified or not when Trump took them to Mar-a-lago. That remains to be seen and it will be huge if Trump wins that argument.