The Daily Fuckup

By Nov. 24, 2022, the Mar-a-Lago records fight was still active and still bad for Donald Trump. What began as a dispute over presidential records had become a separate set of fights over classified material, privilege, access, and federal investigators’ next moves.

The National Archives had already said it received 15 boxes of presidential records from Mar-a-Lago in January 2022, and that some of the contents were marked as classified national security information. Its public account also showed that the records process had moved through the Presidential Records Act framework, with the White House Counsel’s Office involved in the request for FBI access to the material. That made the episode more than a paperwork dispute, even before the criminal case intensified.

The Justice Department search at Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, 2022, pushed the matter into a more serious phase. Then, on Nov. 18, 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith as special counsel to oversee the department’s investigations involving Trump. In Smith’s statement, he said the work would continue independently and expeditiously.

As of Nov. 24, the public record still showed an investigation in motion, not a finished legal judgment. The documents issue remained tangled up in separate but overlapping questions about records custody, classification, and privilege, and that was enough to keep it squarely in Trump’s political bloodstream.