‘It worried people all the time:’ How Trump’s handling of secret documents led to the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search.

Trump’s cavalier approach to sensitive documents, and his lack of preparation to depart the White House, landed him in an FBI investigation, sources say. 

Donald Trump arrives to give remarks during a Save America Rally at the Adams County Fairgrounds, in Mendon, Ill., on June 25, 2022. 

When it finally dawned on Donald Trump in the twilight of his presidency that he wouldn’t be living in the White House for another four years, he had a problem: he had barely packed and had to move out quickly. 

West Wing aides and government movers frantically tossed documents and other items into banker boxes that were shipped to a storage room at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida along with other, previously packed records set aside by Trump, sometimes erratically so, according to two sources with knowledge of Trump’s move and records issues.

There, in that Mar-a-Lago room, some of the boxes contained documents with sensitive materials that the federal government appears to consider so important to national security that FBI agents Monday took the unprecedented step of executing a search warrant at the home of a former president to seize them. The records included 11 sets of classified documents, including some that were labeled secret and top secret, according to a property receipt from the search.

Trump’s style of handling White House documents has been described by people who worked for him as slapdash and ad hoc, contributing to the debacle he now faces. He was known to rip up records that aides would have to retrieve from trash cans or from the floor and tape back together, according to former aides and multiple reports.