WASHINGTON, DC - The Federalist has thrown another monkey wrench into Special Counsel Jack Smith’s politically motivated show trial of former President Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.
According to the outlet, a federal agency worked with Trump’s transition team to send two pallets of “document boxes” relating to Trump’s presidency to his West Palm Beach Mar-a-Lago estate–one year before Smith used FBI stormtroopers to raid the residence and search for said documents.
Smith indicted the former president in June 2023 for alleged mishandling of classified documents, which occurred one year before the FBI raid. Trump has claimed that under the Presidential Records Act, it was his decision what was classified and what was not.
The Federalist says that the General Services Administration (GSA) was in discussions with Trump’s transition team both before and after his term regarding “pallets” of items from during Trump’s presidency, as shown in emails. The GSA told Trump’s transition team that six pallets needed to be transferred from Virginia to Florida.
While two pallets were sent to Mar-a-Lago, four others were sent to a West Palm Beach storage unit, the emails showed. The two pallets scheduled to be sent to Mar-a-Lago contained “document boxes,” according to an email that previewed the shipping charges.
“I understand that we are ready to ship,” said Kathy Geisler, director of the Office of Portfolio Management and Real Estate’s Program Execution Division, in an email sent Aug. 26, 2021. That email 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.”
In a July 2021 letter, Harrison said the items to be shipped from Arlington, Virginia, to Palm Beach were “required to wind down the Office of the Former President or are items that are property of the Federal Government.”
The Federalist noted that it is unknown how long the pallets were at the Virginia facility or who had access to them.
According to an FBI agent in a witness interview, 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 posted by 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), which was recently shown to have colluded with the Biden administration in the records case, was also involved in the transition.
However, by June 2021, NARA archives David Ferriero grew frustrated by the time it took for team Trump to make “good-faith efforts” to address NARA’s concerns. Julie Kelly posted a screenshot of that filing.
The Federalist reached out to NARA to ask if the pallets shipped by GSA included the documents later confiscated by FBI stormtroopers at Smith’s direction. NARA said they had “no awareness about the contents of the materials on the pallets and had no involvement in the move project that is referenced in 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 wrote.
Unlike Trump, Joe Biden, who didn’t have the legal authority to have classified documents as first a senator and then vice president, escaped any legal action after another special counsel, Robert Hur, determined it would be hard to convince a jury that the cognitively impaired Biden “committed a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
So Biden is too old to bear responsibility for committing numerous crimes but is OK to have his finger on the nuclear button.
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