Donald Trump repeatedly used the back of classified documents to write notes and to-do lists for his executive assistant, she told federal investigators, ABC News reports, citing sources familiar with her statements.
“As described to ABC News, the aide, Molly Michael, told investigators that — more than once — she received requests or taskings from Trump that were written on the back of notecards, and she later recognized those notecards as sensitive White House materials — with visible classification markings — used to brief Trump while he was still in office about phone calls with foreign leaders or other international-related matters.”
“The notecards with classification markings were at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate when FBI agents searched the property on Aug. 8, 2022 — but the materials were not taken by the FBI, according to sources familiar with what Michael told investigators,” ABC News adds. The following day she arranged to have the FBI take possession of the documents.
Michael was Trump’s White House Executive Assistant and Oval Office Operations Coordinator, and went to work for him after his term in office, but resigned after “she grew increasingly concerned with how Trump handled recurring requests from the National Archives for the return of all government documents being kept in boxes at Mar-a-Lago — and she felt that Trump’s claims about it at the time would be easy to disprove, according to the sources.”
ABC News notes that “according to what she told investigators, around the same time that the National Archives found nearly 200 classified documents in the 15 boxes and referred the matter to the FBI, Trump began to seem more reluctant to cooperate with the agency, and he asked Michael to help spread a message that no more boxes existed, sources said she recounted.”
ABC News’ Jonathan Karl wrote on social media, “This is big — Trump secretary Molly Michael told federal investigators that Trump wrote her notes – to-do lists! – on the back of documents marked classified, using the documents as if they were scrap paper, according to sources familiar with her statements.”