Former President Donald Trump presented a constant national security threat with his lifestyle and personal habits, according to former officials who worked with him in the White House.
The FBI carried out a search warrant last week at his home at Mar-A-Lago, where he was known for stashing and showing off top-secret documents while president, and former White House officials say he habitually played fast and loose with classified information, reported the New York Times.
“No other president has lived in a hotel,” said John Bolton, his third national security adviser.
Trump irritated aides with his disinterest in briefings, but would then ask for the paperwork that was presented to be sent to his White House residence or his golf club homes at Bedminster, New Jersey, or Palm Beach, Florida, where he infamously reviewed security documents on a North Korea missile test in view of paying members and their guests.
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“They’re mine,” he would say of White House documents, according to three of his advisers.
The National Archives sought boxes full of presidential papers, some of them highly classified, for nearly 18 months before the FBI carried out the search at Mar-A-Lago, where they seized 11 sets of top-secret information, and Bolton and other former aides say it wasn't always clear why he kept some of that paperwork he had ignored during briefings.
“Sort of whatever he wants to grab for whatever reason,” Bolton said. “He may not even fully appreciate" why he hung onto those documents.
Trump was also known to rip up documents and toss them onto the floor, into the trash or in the toilet, and he was also known to blurt out secret information to friends, visiting foreign dignitaries or even his Twitter followers because he seemed to believe he was entitled to do whatever he wanted with presidential information.
“From my own experiences with him, which is bolstered by those around him who are speaking in his defense, his actions seem to fit the pattern that as ‘king,’ he and the state are one and the same,” said national security lawyer Mark Zaid. “He seems to honestly believe that everything he touches belongs to him, and that includes government documents that might be classified.”