‘What took so long?’ New reporting on Trump documents raise new questions for investigators
New reporting shows former President Donald Trump had squirreled away more than 300 classified documents at Mar-A-Lago, and investigators finally took action when they realized he wouldn't turn some of them over voluntarily.
The New York Timesreported that agents swooped into the former president's home after receiving some documents in January and then others in June, but law enforcement expert Chuck Rosenberg told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" how the timeline explained the sense of urgency displayed by investigators but raised new questions about Trump's handling of those documents.
"If you're acting in good faith, if you accidentally took stuff home, right, you would expect that it wouldn't come back in three batches, and perhaps more," said Rosenberg, a former federal prosecutor and acting director of the Drug Enforcement Administration. "If you made a mistake and someone told you you had classified information in the basement of your house, you would go right down there, maybe with somebody to help you, and you would diligently go through everything."
"Why does some stuff come back in January, some more stuff comes back in June, and it still takes an FBI search warrant to get the rest of it, or at least what we think is the rest of it?" Rosenberg continued. "So there's a couple of factors here if you're thinking about it as a federal prosecutor, right? How much stuff did he have? How long did he have it? Why did he have it? When someone told him he had it, what steps did he take to return it? They don't seem to be all that, you know, diligent in that part of it. Then what was the classification level? There's different levels of classified information, from confidential to secret to top secret to top secret compartmented information, so in addition to knowing now that they returned about 300 documents, what was the classification levels of it?"
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"The thing that continues to concern me, if you're acting in good faith, is what took so long, and why is it coming back in batches?" he added. "I don't blame the FBI or Department of Justice one bit for trying to get this stuff back. It's a problem to have it in your basement."
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