Empty folders marked classified included in material seized at Trump’s home

Top secret documents were mixed in with press clippings, personal items and more mundane government papers in the tranche of material seized by the FBI at former US president Donald Trump’s residence in Florida.

A federal judge on Friday unsealed an inventory of items taken in a raid on Mr Trump’s home and club, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach last month. The list shows FBI agents removed 33 boxes of documents from both a storage room and Mr Trump’s office.

In total, there were 18 records found marked “top secret” — the highest classification level reserved for the country’s most closely held secrets. Included in the material seized were nearly 50 empty folders labelled as classified. FBI agents found 43 of these empty folders in the former president’s office at Mar-a-Lago.

About 10,000 government documents and photographs without classification markings were also listed in the inventory.

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In one box there were four magazine or press articles, a government document marked “secret”, a book, 1,571 government documents /photographs without classification markings and two empty folders marked “return to staff secretary/military aide”.

Details of the material were unsealed by US district judge Aileen Cannon one day after she heard oral arguments from Mr Trump’s lawyers and the Department of Justice’s top two counter-intelligence prosecutors over whether she should appoint an outside assessor or “special master” to conduct a privilege review of the materials seized by the FBI.

About 40 other empty folders marked “return to staff secretary/military aide” were also among the documents taken by the FBI.

Mr Trump has described the unprecedented FBI raid on a former president’s home as “horrible and shocking”.

The justice department said in a court filing earlier this week that it had evidence that classified documents were deliberately concealed from the FBI when it tried to retrieve them from Mr Trump’s home in June.

The department also opposed the appointment of a special master, saying the records in question did not belong to Mr Trump and that he could not claim they were covered by executive privilege — a legal doctrine that protects some presidential records.

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At a hearing on Thursday, Judge Cannon had appeared sympathetic to Mr Trump’s request to appoint a special master — an independent third party sometimes appointed by a court in sensitive cases to review materials potentially covered by attorney-client privilege to ensure investigators do not improperly view them. The judge did not issue an immediate ruling on the matter, however.

The inventory unsealed on Friday and an accompanying court filing from the justice department did not say if investigators had determined whether all the contents of the empty folders were recovered. But the filing noted that the inquiry into Mr Trump’s handling of the documents remained “an active criminal investigation”.

Earlier this week, the justice department released as an appendix to a court filing a photograph of several folders seized at Mar-a-Lago with “top secret” markings and some documents with classification markings visible. All of the material was arrayed on a carpet.