Trump insists photos of staff removing boxes from the White House prove nothing ‘secretive’ was happening

Mr Trump says that because the boxes of documents were removed from the White House during the day, nothing secretive could have been happening

Former President Donald Trump claims that photos from 2021 prove that he had no "sinister plot" to horde sensitive government documents when he left the White House after losing the 2020 election.

Earlier this week, the Department of Justice released an image that showed secret and top secret documents recovered in the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago last month spread. Mr Trump was interviewed on the right-wing John Fredericks Radio Show and was asked how the files wound up in his Florida residence.

Mr Trump says he accumulated many documents over the course of his presidency and they were packed up at the end of his term. He claimed he was not trying to secretly remove the documents, citing the 2021 photo showing his staff taking boxes of documents from the White House.

"In other words, it's not like this was some sinister plot," Mr Trump said. "They have pictures of guys standing outside. The boxes are literally outside. The sun is pouring down and they're waiting for a truck and then they have pictures putting them on a truck. There was nothing secret about it. It didn't have to be anything secret."

Mr Trump is currently being investigated for three possible violations of federal law, including the Espionage Act, for removing and failing to return sensitive US documents.

Prosecutors claimed that on 3 June, Mr Trump's lawyers "explicitly prohibited government personnel" — FBI agents, specifically — "from opening or looking inside any of the boxes that remained in the storage room, giving no opportunity for the government to confirm that no documents with classification markings remained."

That prompted a return trip in August during which agents recovered the rest of the documents held in Mr Trump's storage room.

The Justice Department is arguing that the files were likely "concealed and removed" from Mr Trump's storage room in an attempt to "obstruct" the FBI's investigation into his alleged mishandling of documents.

All told, the FBI has recovered more than 320 classified documents from the former president's Florida residence.

Mr Trump has attempted to argue he did nothing wrong, claiming he had a standing order to "declassify everything" that left the White House. However, even a president can't declassify documents by simply declaring them declassified, and there is no evidence other than Mr Trump's word that the order ever occurred.

Further, it wouldn't matter if he did declassify everything, because — under the Espionage Act — certain documents, regardless of their classification, cannot be accessed outside of certain conditions, none of which include being stored in a room at a Florida golf resort.

Government documents are the property of the government, not of individual presidents.