Image of Classified Documents at Mar-a-Lago was FBI ‘Photo Op’: Former Trump Aide

The federal authorities had staged a “photo op” with the newly disclosed photograph showing documents with classified markings at former President Donald Trump’s Florida resort, alleged ex-White House aide Kash Patel.

The image, captured on Aug. 8 during the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago, showed six documents labeled as “top secret” and several marked as “secret” spread across the carpet in Trump’s home.

“Certain of the documents had colored cover sheets indicating their classification status,” said lawyers for the Justice Department (DOJ) in a brief filed on Aug. 30, in which they urged against granting Trump’s motion for a special master; a neutral outsider who would review the seized Mar-a-Lago materials and sift out potentially privileged documents. The lawyers said that even the FBI counterintelligence personnel and DOJ attorneys reviewing the documents had to request additional clearances to review some of the documents.

Documents at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 8, 2022. (FBI)

But Patel, former chief of staff for the Department of Defense under the Trump administration who has worked at the National Security Council, said that merely seeing the cover sheets amounts to little significance.

“The FBI and DOJ staged a photo op with cover sheets that say material is classified or not. And the cover sheet—just so we’re clear—government agencies use those all the time,” he said during a weekly appearance on EpochTV program Kash’s Corner on Aug. 31.

“The cover sheets themselves are not classified, even when the cover sheet says top secret,” he added. “It’s a cover sheet. It’s supposed to be on top of documents that are classified, and what the President has publicly contended is that those documents at Mar a Lago were already declassified by him as the president.”

Trump has repeatedly said he declassified the materials he kept, which the

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