It’s a “quick, everyone get your story straight” kind of morning.

This photo appeared in the DOJ’s latest court filing last night and is rocketing around the Internet today, triggering frantic attempts by Trump and his apologists to spin it.

So the DOJ filing with the photo of classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago (pg. 18), shows them next to a box of frames, including a Time Magazine cover with Trump on it. https://t.co/bywVYUKiBN pic.twitter.com/s4AMHi4qmD

— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) August 31, 2022

Trump’s own spin implies that the documents really were on the premises when the FBI got there but that they’d been declassified, so who cares?

Three problems with that. First, none of the potential charges he’s facing depend on whether the national defense material in his possession was classified. It’s a red herring legally. Second, and relatedly, his lawyers have never made the declassification claim. Third, the idea that Trump ever issued a “standing order” by which classified material would automatically be deemed declassified once it was on his person is preposterous even according to the people who worked for him.

Some cronies with national ambitions have skipped Trump’s line of argument and proceeded directly to insisting that the FBI might have planted the documents, never mind that something like two-thirds of the country will laugh at the idea:

Meanwhile, here’s a U.S. Governor taking the position that maybe the FBI planted the classified documents (which Trump himself says are real and his but that he secretly declassified) and those documents should be made public. pic.twitter.com/v9ckwLY6sZ

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) August 31, 2022

Remember that the documents seized during the search where the *third tranche* of materials recovered from Trump. He gave some back in January after the Archives had pestered him about it for months, then gave some more back this summer when he was served with a subpoena. What we’re seeing in the photos is a small selection from the third tranche which he had secretly kept, even after one of his lawyers signed a letter in June attesting that a “diligent search” had been conducted and no further sensitive material was on the premises at Mar-a-Lago.

That’s why the DOJ included the photo in the filing, to illustrate in a way that words couldn’t just how much was left over after the second tranche and how clearly marked it was as being classified. It took the FBI only a few hours to find it. The lawyer who signed the “diligent search” attestation may now be in legal jeopardy herself.

But to get back to Noem’s point, which seems more likely? That Trump, after twice returning tranches of documents he shouldn’t have had and didn’t want to give up, insisted on holding onto the last few and lying about it? Or that the DOJ, despite having spent months quietly asking Trump to return the materials and spare the department the headache of having to come get them, did an about-face and decided to plant a bunch of stuff in August 2022?

Then there’s this spin, which doesn’t claim the documents were planted but alleges a frame-up nonetheless:

DOJ wins daily PR battle with photo of classified documents strewn across floor at Mar-a-Lago. Story is Trump alleged mis-handling of classified documents, and just look at them — scattered all over the floor! Can you believe it? 1/11 pic.twitter.com/NQfzjCacY2

— Byron York (@ByronYork) August 31, 2022

The point of the photo isn’t to suggest that Trump left the documents like that. If he had, there wouldn’t be blank sheets obscuring the first pages of some. The point, as Lachlan Markay says, was “to demonstrate how much SCI material was present—and how obvious those markings were.” You wouldn’t get a sense of the volume of material they found if the documents were photographed packed tightly together in the boxes they were stored in.

The key point in this clusterfark is that it’s entirely of Trump’s making, up to and including how his dumb legal team precipitated last night’s DOJ filing that contained the photo. That filing was in response to Team Trump’s demand that the court appoint an independent “special master” to review the files seized by the FBI to make sure the feds don’t get to see anything that’s properly protected by some sort of privilege. The right time to request a special master is immediately after the government has seized documents, for the obvious reason that the FBI will begin reviewing them unless the court orders them not to. Trump’s team waited two weeks to make their request, after an FBI “filter team” had already scrutinized the material for privilege, which may mean that it’s now moot. And meanwhile, they’ve given the DOJ an opportunity to elaborate on their case against him by instigating this back-and-forth over the special master.

That Trump and his lawyers appear to have knowingly withheld the third tranche of documents despite attesting otherwise is the main revelation from last night’s filing. It helps explain why one of the potential charges listed in the search warrant involves obstruction:

In parts of the filing, using only their job descriptions, prosecutors paint Trump’s lawyer, Evan Corcoran, and custodian of records, Christina Bobb, as so uncooperative as to lead agents to suspect the Trump team might be obstructing the investigation.

The filing, for instance, says that when FBI agents and Jay Bratt, the chief of the counterintelligence and export control section at the Justice Department, met with Trump’s two representatives in early June, “the former President’s counsel explicitly prohibited government personnel from opening or looking inside any of the boxes that remained in the storage room, giving no opportunity for the government to confirm that no documents with classification markings remained.”

Yet, earlier this month, Bobb told The Washington Post that the lawyers showed the federal officials the boxes, and that Bratt and others spent some time looking through the material.

For a thorough analysis of the claims in the new filing, read this thread by former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti. The next round of spin, I assume, will be to insist that Trump’s lawyers might have screwed up by not returning the documents promptly but that there’s no proof that Trump himself knew what was going on. That spin has problems too, though:

DOJ says FBI claimed his passports (before returning them) because they were in the same desk drawer as classified documents and the warrant authorized the seizure of “collectively stored or found together” documents. pic.twitter.com/rDW0TZq0Rt

— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) August 31, 2022

Recall that some of Trump’s followers originally defended him by suggesting that he should not be expected to know what various unnamed movers brought from the White House to MAL.

If he’s keeping his passports with some of the materials, that suggestion holds far less water.

— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) August 31, 2022

This is a sharp point. If Trump was storing some of the documents with his personal effects it becomes very hard for him to say he didn’t know about them. They’re with his personal effects, not off somewhere in a dusty room. https://t.co/QZiMSyJCcx

— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) August 31, 2022

The redacted search warrant affidavit noted that when Trump returned the first tranche of documents in January, the National Archives found classified material “intermixed” with mundane documents like magazines and printouts of news stories. The photo up top shows classified stuff sitting right next to a box with a framed Time magazine cover visible in it. The commingling of official documents with personal effects doesn’t prove that Trump himself did the commingling, but it’s suggestive.

And if you believe WaPo’s reporting, there are witnesses who claim that he absolutely did know what was in the boxes, having reviewed them personally before the first tranche was returned to the Archives in January: “It could not be determined who was involved with packing the boxes at Mar-a-Lago or why some White House documents were not sent to the Archives, though people familiar with the episode said Trump oversaw the process himself — and did so with great secrecy, declining to show some items even to top aides.”

I continue to think John Bolton’s theory best explains why Trump insisted on retaining so much classified material despite the jeopardy involved in doing so. It’s not because he wanted to sell secrets to the Saudis or because he feared that information in some of the documents might be evidence of his own criminal activity in office. It’s because the documents were valuable and prestigious, he viewed the presidency as his personal fiefdom, and he didn’t think the DOJ would have the stones to confront him knowing how he would end up demagoging that to his fans as another “witch hunt.” He miscalculated. No wonder he sounds panicked lately.