An attorney representing former President Donald Trump gave a bizarre explanation as to why he had a classified folder in his bedroom.
Lawyer Timothy Parlatore appeared on CNN on Sunday saying that Mr Trump used the folder to block the light stemming from the phone on his nightstand.
Mr Parlatore said it was “one of the more humorous aspects of this whole thing” before going on to claim that the folder wasn’t classified despite being marked as such, adding that it was empty.
“He has one of those landline telephones next to his bed and it has a blue light on it and it keeps him up at night,” the lawyer said. “So he took the manilla folder and put it over so it would keep the light down so he could sleep at night.”
“When DOJ found out about it they went crazy. They gave me a subpoena to say ‘give us over this empty folder that means nothing.’ Everything we have done as part of the search has been in the spirit of full cooperation and compliance. Now the president has to find a different way to keep the blue light out of his eyes,” he added.
After being asked at the beginning of his CNN appearance why classified materials keep appearing in Mr Trump’s possession, Mr Parlatore said “what has happened here that you’ve seen here and also in the [President Joe] Biden and [former Vice President Mike] Pence investigations is that the White House does not have proper procedures for handling classified information. And these documents, when they get backed up and sent out when people leave office, they do keep showing up, if you will”.
“We conducted a search back in December, which is where we found these documents. And we turned them over immediately,” he added. “These were not turned over last week, although, you know, the DOJ leaked it last week. This was turned over back in December. And so, we have gone through, we’ve tried to work with the DOJ. We’ve tried to do searches of all of the relevant places. And anytime we’ve found anything, we’ve immediately turned it over.”
Mr Palvatore also noted that a staff member from Mr Trump’s Save America political action committee was working as one of his aides.
“She was working as an aide to the president. And this is a box that had all of his daily schedules from his time in office. And she scanned all of those as part of, you know, being available for future speeches or biographies or things like that. And after we did the search in December and we found that within this box of thousands that there were a couple of pages that had a little marking at the bottom, which we turned over,” the lawyer said.
“After that, we found out that she had scanned the box so that it would be digitized. She had no idea that there were any classification markings on anything,” he added. “And as soon as we found out about that, we called up DOJ to let them know. And immediately provided them access to it.”
The CNN anchor said that they also handed over an empty folder marked “classified,” which prompted the “humorous” explanation.
“This is not a classified folder,” he said. “This is a folder that when my team went through and searched and they wrote up their report, which we turned over to DOJ, they saw, it’s a Manila folder that says ‘Classified Evening Summary’ on it. And it was in the president’s bedroom,” he said, going on to explain that it was used for blocking light.
Asked how the Department of Justice discovered the existence of the folder, Mr Palvatore told CNN, “we put it in our report. When we did all of our searches, we wrote up reports on everywhere we searched, everywhere we looked, anything we found, where we found it. And we gave that to them because everything that we’ve done as a part of that search has been in the spirit of full cooperation and compliance”.
“And when they read that and they saw, oh, there is this folder here that is so far outside of the scope of the subpoena or anything else, they demanded it back. And so now the president has to find a different way to get the blue light out of his eyes,” he said.
The anchor asked if the episode and a similar folder being on display at a bar in Trump Tower revealed a “flippant” attitude towards classified papers.
“Not at all. Not at all,” Mr Palvatore protested. “These are folders that, you know, he was given during his time in office. He didn’t keep the contents of the folder, but the folder itself was interesting, so he did keep a copy, you know, some of the folders, he put one on display at the 45 Bar. He put one on his phone down in Mar-a-Lago.”
“When we went through the boxes at the National Archives, we found a few more of them there. It’s essentially a piece of stationery. It doesn’t actually contain anything controlled or anything really that’s a problem,” he said.
