A federal agency worked with the Trump transition team to send two pallets of “document boxes” relating to former President Donald Trump’s presidency to his Mar-a-Lago home — one year before Special Counsel Jack Smith then raided the residence to look for classified documents.
Smith indicted Trump in June of 2023 for allegedly mishandling classified documents, one year after armed federal agents raided Mar-a-Lago in search of such documents.
The General Services Administration (GSA) was in talks with Trump’s team both during and after his term regarding “pallets” of items from the president’s tenure, emails show. The GSA informed Trump’s transition team that there were six pallets that needed to be transferred from Virginia to Florida.
Of the six pallets, two were designated to be sent to Mar-a-Lago and four to a West Palm Beach storage unit, according to emails. The two pallets to be delivered to Mar-a-Lago from an Arlington, Virginia facility contained “document boxes,” according to an email previewing the shipping charges.
“I understand that we are ready to ship,” read an email sent Aug. 26, 2021 by Kathy Geisler, the director of the Office of Portfolio Management and Real Estate’s Program Execution Division, that included Trump aide Beau Harrison as a recipient. “I know that originally we had 3 pallets going to the storage unit — that is now 4 pallets going to the storage unit. 2 Pallets will go to Mar-a-Lago.”
A July 2021 letter from Harrison stated the items to be shipped from Arlington, Virginia to Palm Beach, Florida were “required to wind down the Office of the Former President or are items that are property of the Federal Government.”
It is unclear how long the pallets sat in the Virginia facility or who had access to them.
An FBI agent said during a witness interview that the GSA was in possession of six pallets and that the office “contacted the office of 45 to inform them that, you know, they have to go,” according to a screenshot of the transcript posted by independent journalist Julie Kelly.
“They — someone has to pick them up, or they have to be shipped, or something to that effect.”
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) was also involved in the transition, but by June 2021, NARA archivist David Ferriero had become frustrated by the pace of “good-faith efforts” by Trump’s team to address NARA’s concerns, a filing screenshot posted by Kelly shows.
The Federalist asked NARA whether the pallets shipped by GSA included the documents that were later confiscated by Smith’s team during their raid of Mar-a-Lago, and NARA’s media staff responded that the agency had “no awareness about the contents of the materials on the pallets and had no involvement in the move project that is referenced in the GSA emails.”
“NARA was harassing Trump throughout 2021 for what they insisted were government records apparently WITHOUT contacting GSA to search dozens of boxes in their possession,” Kelly observed.
President Joe Biden, whose Justice Department is carrying out this and another political prosecution of Trump, escaped indictment for his own classified documents scandal after a special counsel determined it would be hard to convince a jury that the aging president committed “a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”