Perhaps the most thought-provoking component of the court filing submitted Tuesday night by the Justice Department did not involve legal argumentation or an articulation of the department’s possible case against former president Donald Trump. Instead, it was a photograph showing documents arrayed on the floor of an unidentified room.
The photo of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, annotated
The government’s months-long effort to recover documents that were kept at Trump’s Florida residence after he left the White House doesn’t depend on that material being classified. But the question of whether Trump had classified material with him at his Mar-a-Lago resort has captured the public’s attention. The photo published by the government appears to answer that question quite affirmatively.
There is detail in the photograph that bears closer examination, detail not immediately apparent
