The ongoing controversy over former President Donald Trump’s handling of documents has been put into a new light.
One member of the legal team for Trump, Timothy Parlatore, reportedly stated that former president Trump made use of an empty manilla folder marked “Classified Evening Summary” as a make-shift lampshade to block the light on his bedroom landline telephone that was too bright and keeping him awake at night.
“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 explained to 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.”
Parlatore is currently representing Trump when it comes to Jack Smith’s special counsel investigation concerning the former president’s handling of government documents once he left office and the circumstances which lead to the previous breach of the U.S. Capitol that took place on January 6, 2021.
CNN previously stated in a report that based on a number of unnamed sources, the folder was given to the Justice Department along with materials sporting classified markings and a laptop that was previously utilized by an aide to Trump at some point between December and January in the wake of a subpoena in May.
The aide took time to copy a few pages sporting classified marking onto the laptop without realizing that the papers had been classified, Parlatore was quick to assure those with CNN. “We’ve tried to do searches of all the relevant places, and anytime we’ve found anything, we’ve immediately turned it over,” he stated.
Trump has been very vocal in his frequent denials of any wrongdoing. He has been harshly critical of the investigation ever since it entered the sight of the public back in August 2022 when the FBI carried out a raid on the residence owned by Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida resort owned by the former president, to gather boxes of classified documents that Trump had allegedly refused to give back to the national archives.
Going against the claims of cooperation from Parlatore, Trump issued a response to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s announcement to appoint Smith as the special counsel just a few days after Trump officially announced his intent to carry out a 2024 presidential campaign by telling Fox News that he “won’t partake” in the inquiry.
