Former President Donald Trump argued in a court filing Wednesday that the National Archives should have expected to find classified material among the 15 boxes Trump turned over in January from Mar-a-Lago because they were presidential records.
amp.cnn.com
Why should anyone have expected there to be classified materials at his home if he declassified all of them.
Most of this seems to stem from what appears to be his firmly held belief that he should still be president.
His attempt to claim executive privilege, which is attached to the office, not the person, and always rightly favours the sitting president (as Nixon found out)
His belief that he has a right to hold governmental documents, regardless of classification, despite no longer being in office, because he thinks he should be in office.
The photos are also a smart move by the DoJ as while they only show coversheets, that's enough to undo Trump's claim of declasification. While the (sitting) president does have pretty much blanket powers to declassify, that is not complete until the coversheets and each and every page have been stamped as 'declassified' and dated. It doesn't legally matter what steps Trump (or anyone) has done up to that point, until that final stage is taken, the documents are not legally declassified. The pictures being in the public domain help to re-enforce that point should Trump or his lawyers attempt to argue otherwise.
One other bit that has been picked up from the DoJ's latest filling is around his passports, and once again Trump walked into it willingly. They took his passports, and crucially logged the location they were found and what they were found with because they were found in a desk drawer along with classified governmental papers, in taking them and him complaining about it, two things were established.
- Trump intermingled his personal documents with classified governmental ones, showing insecure storage
- As they are his passports they establish a link between him and the classified governmental papers, weakening any claim that they were never handled by him personally.