WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said on Friday that boxes of classified documents that the FBI seized from his Mar-a-Lago home during an investigation into possible misconduct have been returned to him, and that he would one day display them in his presidential library.

Trump said that the boxes, which contained top secret documents that he had faced charges of improperly taking with him when he left the White House after his first term, had been returned by the Justice Department, now led by his own appointees.

The department “just returned the boxes that Deranged Jack Smith made such a big deal about,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, referring to the special counsel who had led the case over the documents.

“They are being brought down to Florida and will someday be part of the Trump Presidential Library,” he wrote, without clarifying if all the documents that had originally been kept in the boxes had also been returned.

Trump repeated his position that he “did absolutely nothing wrong” and his claim that the case against him was a political witchhunt. The FBI raided Mar-a-Lago in 2022 in a bid to retrieve the classified documents, which Smith had accused Trump of stashing at the Florida golf club after leaving the White House the year before.

Photographs had shown the top secret documents — which included records from the Pentagon and the CIA — piled haphazardly and unsecured in a gleaming bathroom at the busy club.

Trump had allegedly thwarted multiple efforts by the previous administration of Joe Biden to retrieve them. The prosecution was still moving through the legal system when Trump returned to power on January 20.

Nine days later, Smith dropped the case, citing a Justice Department policy of not indicting or prosecuting a sitting president. He also resigned from the department.

Published in Dawn, March 2nd, 2025