Trump used folder bearing ‘classified’ wording to block light keeping him awake at night, lawyer says

A lawyer for former President Donald Trump shared a surprising explanation for what Trump was doing at his Mar-a-Lago resort with a folder bearing "classified" wording that was recently turned over to federal investigators.

The lawyer, Tim Parlatore, was asked in a CNN interview Sunday about what he said was an empty folder labeled “classified evening summary” that was given to investigators. Parlatore described the folder as “one of the more humorous aspects of this whole thing.”

The folder was in Trump’s bedroom at his estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and he was using it help him sleep better at night, Parlatore said.

“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,” Parlatore said. “So he took the manila folder and he put it over it so that it would keep the light down so he could sleep at night.”

Despite being labeled with the words “classified evening summary,” the folder did not bear classified markings, and it was empty, Parlatore said.

"It is not a classification marking," he said. "It's not anything that is controlled in any way. There's nothing illegal about it. There's nothing in it."

But the Justice Department “went crazy” when it found out about it, he said.

“They actually gave me a subpoena to say give us over this empty folder that means nothing,” he continued.

Asked how investigators found out about the folder next to Trump’s bed, Parlatore said Trump’s legal team wrote reports about the places it searched for classified documents and shared the information with investigators.

“And when they read that, and they saw, oh, there’s this folder here that is so far outside of the scope of the subpoena or anything else, they demanded it back,” Parlatore said.

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“So now the president has to find a different way to keep the blue light out of his eyes.”

Trump’s legal team voluntarily turned over the folder, which it said was found at Mar-a-Lago, to the Justice Department last month, a senior law enforcement official said last week.

It is unclear what level of classification markings were on the folder or what it might have contained.

The Justice Department has continued efforts to recover classified documents from Trump after FBI agents searched his Florida residence with a warrant last year. Agents found more than 100 documents with classification markings after Trump’s lawyers said he had returned all documents with classified markings from the White House, Justice Department officials said in court filings in August. Two more documents with classified markings were found at a storage facility not far from Mar-a-Lago in December and were turned over to the FBI.

A “small number” of classified documents were also found at former Vice President Mike Pence’s Indiana home last month, according to his lawyer. The FBI discovered an additional classified document at Pence’s Indiana home during a voluntary five-hour search Friday.

Obama-era classified documents were found in President Joe Biden’s Delaware home and an office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C.