Extract from ABC News
Throughout Donald Trump's presidency, he had a reckless attitude towards documents — one that has come back to haunt him.
This week he was charged with instructing his employees to delete CCTV evidence of farcical and allegedly criminal behaviour.
They're just the latest charges in the case against the former US president over his decision to take classified documents with him when he left the White House.
So how did Donald Trump come undone by a bunch of boxes?
Trump loves his boxes
Since the Watergate scandal, laws have stipulated a president can't destroy documents. But when he was president, Trump didn't really care.
He reportedly would rip them up and flush them down toilets.
From 2018 onwards, White House officials realised what he was doing was illegal and began collecting the ripped-up pieces of paper and taping them back together.
But Trump said he thought government documents were his private property, and any time he came across one he liked, he would pop it into a cardboard box.
Aides would carry these boxes from the Oval Office to the residence, onto Air Force One when he was travelling, and into foreign hotels when he was overseas.
The boxes contained a mixture of newspapers, press photos of Trump he'd had printed out, binders, and classified documents.
Trump felt very attached to the boxes. Aides made jokes about his attachment to them, calling them "his Beautiful Mind boxes".
To him, they were souvenirs of his presidency, to do with as he wished.
The boxes move to Mar-a-Lago
Two days before Trump left office, "his" boxes were shipped to his private Florida club Mar-a-Lago, an apricot-coloured, beachside holiday destination.
Trump put the boxes on the stage of the club's White and Gold Ballroom and they stayed there for several months, even while events were held.
Trump's staff debated what to do with the boxes.
Eventually, they moved some of the boxes into a bathroom off one of the suites in the Members Club. Others were put in a few different storage rooms.
Trump showed the papers inside the boxes to people when it suited him — a writer who visited him, a person raising funds for his re-election — and those are just the ones we know about.
The cover-up
During this period, the archivist of the United States, David Ferriero, was compiling the documents of the Trump era for the National Archives and discovered lots of them were missing.
He opened an investigation and sent letters to Trump, asking him to give back the piles of documents. The letters got more and more insistent. The letters turned into subpoenas.
Trump lawyered up.
"I don't want anybody looking," he told his attorneys, according to the indictment.
"I don't want anybody looking through my boxes. I really don't. I don't want you looking through my boxes."
To appease Ferriero, Trump sent him 15 boxes of documents. The archivist said he was certain that wasn't all of them.
Trump had all of his boxes brought into a storage room, and invited his lawyer to review them.
But then, before the lawyer arrived, he changed his mind and allegedly asked his employees to hide half of the boxes in his residence.
The following day, when the FBI arrived to collect the documents from the storage room, they asked to review footage from Mar-a-Lago's CCTV cameras.
Trump, knowing that the tapes would show his employees hiding documents from his lawyer, allegedly asked the same employee to delete the footage.
But the employee couldn't find an IT worker who knew how to delete the files. The FBI got hold of them.
The FBI watched the Fawlty Towers-esque farce shown on the tapes, of boxes being shuttled back and forth, in and out of the storage room.
The FBI decided enough was enough and raided Trump's Mar-a-Lago home.
During their nine-hour raid, FBI agents found 102 documents marked classified, including 17 with the highest level of classification — "top secret".
What are the charges?
In June, Donald Trump was charged with 37 felony crimes. Three more were added in a superseding indictment this week.
Crucially, all of the charges relate to documents that were still in his house after the initial 15 boxes were sent to the archivist, meaning if he'd just sent all the boxes straightaway there's a chance he would not have been charged.
The Justice Department alleges that he wilfully retained 32 highly classified documents, primarily relating to foreign countries and US military capabilities, for a year and a half.
They allege that he and his employees conspired to hide the documents from investigators, and that he and his employees lied to the FBI about his own efforts to locate the documents the National Archives were asking for.
And that he and the employees attempted to delete CCTV footage of them hiding documents from Trump's own lawyer.
What is Trump's defence?
Donald Trump is claiming that what he did was not illegal.
He's arguing, yes I robbed the bank — but the money was mine anyway, so there's no crime here.
"If you're the president of the United States you can declassify just by saying it's declassified," he told Fox News.
"Even if just by thinking about it because you are sending it to Mar-a-Lago or wherever you're sending it. When you send it, it's declassified. I declassified everything."
Now, this isn't true. There's a formal process for declassifying information.
And Trump knows it's not true because the FBI has him on tape showing classified documents to a writer who visited Mar-a-Lago.
"It is, like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look at this," he said.
"As president I could have declassified it. Now I can't, you know, but this is still a secret."
The trial is scheduled for next May.
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