It’s not often that I’m left speechless by much of anything these days. I’ve been in politics for quite some time and while a lot of things appall and disgust me, there’s very little that truly takes me by surprise anymore.
But this… This did it. This left my eyes wide and my head shaking and honestly, left me a bit speechless if I’m being completely honest.
One of Donald Trump’s attorneys has gained quite a bit of attention this week after he spoke with CNN yesterday and said that the former president had been using an empty classified briefing folder in his private bedroom to cover a blue light on his landline phone that he found irritating, and made it difficult for him to fall asleep.
Trump attorney Timothy Parlatore’s deeply bizarre declaration about the former guy’s private quarters came in response to multiple reports that the Trump legal team had been forced to turn over an empty manilla folder, bearing a “Classified Evening Briefing,” to officials with the Biden Justice Department last month.
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Both The Guardian and CNN report that Trump’s attorneys were forced to hand the folder over following a DOJ-issued subpoena after prosecutors learned that the folder was located inside the private residential quarters where the ex-president now lives, post-White House, at his Palm Beach, Florida, Mar-a-Lago golf resort.
Parlatore is a member of Donald Trump’s legal team and represents the ex-president in the infamous stolen classified documents case that continues to run against him. In speaking with CNN, the Trump attorney confirmed that the legal team has turned over additional classified materials to the DOJ that were in the former president’s possession, and further confirmed that this folder was one of those materials handed over. However, Parlatore pointedly noted that the folder in question was empty and devoid of any actual classified material, before divulging an extremely bizarre explanation as to Donald Trump’s alleged use for it in his private bedroom.
Apparently, according to the Trump attorney, the ex-president was using the classified briefing folder to block an annoying blue light that shines on his landline phone, which was keeping him awake at night.
“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 told CNN on the matter. “So he took the manilla folder and put it over so it would keep the light down so he could sleep at night.”
“It’s just this folder … There is nothing illegal about it, there’s nothing in it,” the Trump attorney said, going on to add, “When DOJ found out about it, they went crazy and they actually gave me the subpoena to say ‘give us over this empty folder that means nothing.'”
The bizarre, allegedly empty folder was discovered to be in Trump’s private residence four months after the FBI first executed their search and seizure raid against the scandal-ridden former president’s Palm Beach estate, where they seized hundreds upon hundreds of classified documents and materials from the unsecured golf club.
Parlatore’s eyebrow-raising excuse for the folder appears to echo Donald Trump’s own earlier defenses of his actions and rants against FBI officials, when he took to Truth Social earlier this year and claimed that law enforcement agents merely seized numerous empty folders from his Palm Beach resort, further attempting to indicate that he didn’t actually do anything wrong.
“When I was in the Oval Office, or elsewhere, ‘papers’ were distributed to groups of people & me, they would often be in a striped paper folder with ‘Classified’ or ‘Confidential’ or another word on them,” Trump wrote at the time. “When the session was over, they would collect the paper(s), but not the folders, & I saved hundreds of them.”
“Remember, these were just ordinary, inexpensive folders with various words printed on them, but they were a ‘cool’ keepsake,” he added.
The US Department of Justice ultimately released several photos of the Mar-a-Lago raid to the American public last summer, and suffice it to say that the pictures directly contradict Trump’s claims. In fact, one specific and now-infamous photo shows countless redacted documents in folders, spread out across the unmistakable carpeted floor of Mar-a-Lago, many of which bear labels that clearly read “TOP SECRET.”
In addition to the Mar-a-Lago document scandal, Parlatore also represents the former president in the DOJ’s investigation into Donald Trump’s role in the deadly January 6th attack against the Capitol.
You can watch the Trump attorney’s CNN appearance here:
“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. So he took the manilla folder and put it over so it would keep the light down so he could sleep at night.” https://t.co/SNR8dS0pJw
— Zachary Cohen (@ZcohenCNN) February 12, 2023
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
