Lawyer Timothy Parlatore said on Sunday that former President Trump, whom Parlatore represents, used an empty folder that said “Classified Evening Summary” to block a light in his bedroom at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.
“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. So he took the manilla folder and put it over so it would keep the light down so he could sleep at night,” Parlatore told CNN.
“It’s just this folder. It says ‘Classified Evening Summary’ on it. It’s not a classification marking. It’s not anything that is controlled in any way. There is nothing illegal about it.”
The folder was reportedly turned over to the Justice Department in December, months after the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, along with more materials with classified markings and a laptop belonging to a current Trump aide.
Classified materials had reportedly been electronically copied onto the laptop.
“What … you’ve seen here and also in the Biden and Pence investigations is that the White House does not have proper procedures for handling classified information. And these documents, when they get packed up and sent out when people leave office, they do keep showing up, if you will,” Parlatore said.
Hundreds of classified materials were recovered from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home last summer.
In the fall and early this year, President Biden’s team turned over to the DOJ a handful of classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president and as a senator kept in an old office and in Biden’s Delaware home. A small number of classified documents were then found at the home of Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence.
The DOJ has been locked in a long-running effort to recover classified materials and records from the former president, kept after his tenure in the White House came to a close.
The document discoveries have sparked scrutiny over the leaders’ document handling, and a special counsel has been appointed to probe both the Biden and Trump instances.