Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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To understand Donald Trump’s problem with the documents at Mar-a-Lago, one must understand the concept of ownership of personal property. An analogy would be owning a house. Once the deed is recorded, the owner can only sell it, gift it or lose it in a court case. Title to personal property is similar, except there is no recording and the owner can trash it. No one can just claim the property. There is no law providing for finder’s keepers, loser’s weepers.
Trump’s legal problem is that he is unable to claim title to these 11,000 government documents by any of these methods; he didn’t buy them, wasn’t given them, they weren’t found in the trash, thus the documents belong to the government.
An analogy would be if a fired president of a bank were found in possession of a large amount of cash and jewelry from safe-deposit boxes. The ex-president claims he was going to loan himself the money because as president, he had the power to loan money, or someone planted the items in his house or the box owners all gave him the jewelry.
In this scenario, the jewelry represents classified documents. Such arguments wouldn’t fly. There is an exemption for personal items, but even news clippings taken from White House subscriptions and clipped by White House staffers would not be personal.
When Trump tries to fight the release of any of the documents, he is basically admitting possession of stolen documents and, if classified, even worse.
