Former President Donald Trump has spent much of Wednesday ranting about his scandal involving the White House documents and classified materials that were found at his Mar-a-Lago resort. One of the claims being questioned by experts is the idea that Trump kept the folders with classified information on them as a "keepsake."
"Remember, these were just ordinary, inexpensive folders with various words printed on them, but they were a 'cool' keepsake," Trump said on his social media site.
"When I was in the Oval Office, or elsewhere, & 'papers' were distributed to groups of people & me, they would often be in a striped paper folder with 'Classified' or 'Confidential' or another word on them. When the session was over, they would collect the paper(s), but not the folders, & I saved hundreds of them..." the former president added in a subsequent post.
But experts say that isn't the way it works.
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According to those with higher levels of security clearance, the documents don't tend to leave their folders. Sometimes they're even stapled into the folders, but not always. Each page is typically marked clearly so that even if the documents leave the folders it has the clearance levels on them.
Things marked with "top secret" are watermarked so if it is copied the watermark will be darker as a way of proving that it was copied, which is against the rules.
Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath explained, "Like almost everything else he says, this claim is false. This is not how classified briefings work. The folders are there to protect the material while it is in transit. You are not given the folders as keepsakes after the briefing is completed."
Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance, who now teaches at the University of Alabama School of Law, agreed.
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"This isn't true unless they were incredibly dysfunctional," she said of Donald Trump's intelligence services. "Classified materials stay in their marked folders."
National security expert Marcy Wheeler took it another way, noting that Trump implied that he still had a number of classified folders that the FBI hadn't taken possession of.
Wheeler suspected Trump's comments are "the kind of out of context comment that seems like a response to something."
Ryan Goodman, the former special counsel for the Department of Defense called Trump's post "an admission he knew they [classified documents] were there (46 of them). Notably found alongside 103 docs marked as classified."
Goodman posted the full evidence list, showing that indeed some of the empty folders were taken, but it's indicated that those folders were empty in the court records. The 103 documents of the highest classification include the actual documents.
"Another incrimination admission," Goodman said.
He also remarked that Trump's comments come as another "shifting defenses and justifications." The former president faces a very real danger that his claim "can potentially be disproven by FBI and Intel Community tracking the missing contents of those folders."
