Trump secret documents case: Why didn't he just return the boxes?

Trump's lawyers reportedly urged him to quietly return the documents

(Image credit: U.S. Department of Justice via Getty Images)

published 21 June 2023

From the moment in early 2021 when the National Archives asked former President Donald Trump to return the boxes of documents he improperly sent to Mar-a-Lago from the White House, some of his lawyers urged him to quietly hand them back, The Washington Post reported.

Instead, Trump "misled his own advisers, telling them the boxes contained only newspaper clippings and clothes," and "repeatedly refused to give the documents back, even when some of his longest-serving advisers warned of peril and some flew to Mar-a-Lago to beg him to return them," the Post said.

Trump was arraigned on 37 felony counts of willfully retaining government secrets and obstructing the government's repeated efforts to get them back. None of the charges concern the documents Trump returned voluntarily in the first half of 2022. "This is a situation entirely of his own making," former Attorney General William Barr wrote in The Free Press. "Trump would not have been indicted just for taking the documents in the first place. Nor would he have been indicted even if he delayed returning them for a period while arguing about it."

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As Trump rejected the advice from his lawyers and advisers again and again, he "instead took the advice of Tom Fitton, the head of the conservative group Judicial Watch," who convinced Trump "he could legally keep the documents and should fight the Justice Department," the Post reported. Fitton repeatedly brought up the "Clinton socks case," a "reference to tapes Bill Clinton stored in his sock drawer of his secret interviews with historian Taylor Branch."

Trump had at least nine attorneys in the classified documents case, Lisa Needham wrote at Public Notice, and "he probably could have avoided in an indictment altogether if he'd listened to their advice. Fitton isn't a lawyer, after all, but "a combative conservative who has carved a path for himself as a nuisance litigant with an insatiable appetite for suing Democrats," and in this case he's "perhaps even more willing than Trump is to ignore obvious facts and to believe his expertise is far more valuable than it is."

Trump started collecting cardboard boxes of documents and clippings from the Oval Office early in his presidency, and "his aides began to refer to the boxes full of papers and odds and ends he carted around with him almost everywhere as the 'beautiful mind' material," a reference to schizophrenic mathematician John Nash, The New York Times reported. The "blizzard of newspapers and official documents" were disorganized, but "Trump would notice if somebody had riffled through them or they were not arranged in a particular way."

"I really don't want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don't, I don't want you looking through my boxes," Trump told his lawyer Evan Corcoran, the indictment recounts. He also said, according to Corcoran's subpoenaed notes, that it would "be better if we just told [federal investigators] we don't have anything there," and asked "what happens if we just don't respond at all or don't play ball with them?"

Trump told Fox News anchor Bret Baier that his boxes from the White House "were interspersed with all sorts of things," like "golf shirts, clothing, pants, shoes," and before he sent the documents back to the National Archives, "I want to go through the boxes and get all my personal things out." Trump suggested he did not sort out his personal stuff before the FBI seized the documents because he "was very busy, as you've sort of seen."

Trump is like a "defiant 9-year-old kid, who's always pushing the glass toward the edge of the table, defying his parents to stop him from doing it," Barr elaborated on CBS's Face the Nation. "It's a means of self-assertion and exerting his dominance over other people. And he's a very petty individual who will always put his interests ahead of the country's, his personal gratification of his ego, but our country can't be a therapy session for a troubled man like this."

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.