Reading through the Washington Post article, it’s difficult on a close read to make much of anything they say.
In short, they specify exactly that:
- Trump had some boxes of something moved INTO a storage AREA, the day before they allowed the DOJ to come over and pick up the initial set of 38 documents for return.
- The NYT reported, a month ago, about Trump holding what some officials described as a first step to preparing to hide stuff - a “dress rehearsal”. This would have been within a few weeks of receiving the initial subpoena that lead the return of the 38 documents. But there are no details about this event beyond a description that Trump mentioned something about “keeping what’s his” while looking through documents…and that’s it.
Issues with #1:
It’s not clear where the boxes came from. It’s not clear that the storage AREA is different from the storage ROOM where most of everything was later found. Putting a box back into storage room that it came from, after being asked to find classified documents, seems fairly benign, expectable, and encouraged. Taking documents from the storage ROOM and moving them to the separate and different storage AREA, before inviting a DOJ agent to come and inspect your storage ROOM, is concerning. Distinguishing between the two is pretty vital to the story.
Not clarifying any of that is bad reporting.
Issues with #2:
I can’t open the specified NYT article (“Witnesses asked about Trump’s handling of classified map”) but everything that other sites wrote about it at the time sounds completely disconnected from the WP’s description.
But ignoring that, the larger issue is that we’re being told that Trump looked through boxes that had a mix of stuff - mostly magazines which featured articles about his presidency - and said, “I want to make sure that my stuff stays here.” Unless he was showing and pointing to a classified document as he said it, there’s no particular reason to assume that he meant anything other than that he wanted to keep that stuff which was legitimately his to keep. There’s no mention of him telling people to move stuff out of sight nor burn it, it just says that he took a quick peek through and commented about wanting to not lose his things. It’s hard to understand, from the details given, how we go from there to someone in government describing the episode as a “dress rehearsal”.
And I say all this to fault the WP for bad writing, bad question asking, or putting too much trust in its sources, not to defend Trump. If the official who described the situation as a “dress rehearsal” is someone in the DOJ then I’d presume that there’s a better account of the matter that better explains that description. But, if the “official” is a Congressman who was briefed on the matter and, of his lonesome, decided to interpret “I want to keep my stuff” as clearly indicating that Trump was undoubtedly searching for the items that he’ll need to come and grab, himself, if the FBI shows up, knocking. I’m not sure that I’d accept the reasonableness of the description.