Prosecutors release new photos of ‘highly guarded secrets’ in messy boxes at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago

Special counsel Jack Smith has defended federal law enforcement’s handling of documents discovered at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property, sharing images in a new court filing that show how the former president stashed “top secret” materials and government “secrets” in a cluttered collection of clothing, Christmas ornaments, newspapers and photographs of himself.

The former president has argued that the charges in his classified documents case should be dropped on grounds that investigators failed to preserve evidence in the order in which they were found.

In photographs attached to a 33-page filing on Monday night, documents marked “secret” and “top secret” or bearing the White House emblem are seen stuffed in cardboard boxes alongside piles of golf shirts, sitting on top of old newspapers, and next to crates of Diet Coke.

One image shows a closet with newspapers and other documents spilling out on the floor from tipped-over boxes.

Smith’s team wrote that Trump “personally chose to keep documents containing some of the nation’s most highly guarded secrets in cardboard boxes along with a collection of other personally chosen keepsakes of various sizes and shapes from his presidency – newspapers, thank you notes, Christmas ornaments, magazines, clothing, and photographs of himself and others.”

After he left the White House in January 2021, Trump took his “cluttered collection of keepsakes” to his Florida home, “where the boxes traveled from one readily accessible location to another — a public ballroom, an office space, a bathroom, and a basement storage room,” according to prosecutors.

“Against this backdrop of the haphazard manner in which Trump chose to maintain his boxes, he now claims that the precise order of the