As a former White House press secretary and spokesperson for first lady Melania Trump, Stephanie Grisham has had a unique view of the former first family’s life in Washington, D.C., in Florida and elsewhere. Asked Tuesday whether any of the facts contained in Trump’s federal indictment surprised her, Grisham told CNN that her “short answer is no.”
“It all rang true,” she said before going on to illustrate his style of thinking: “‘Why don’t we just take those documents out? It wouldn’t be a problem, right?’ That’s so him.”
Trump pleaded not guilty in a Miami courthouse Tuesday to 37 felony counts relating to scores of top-secret and classified government documents that he improperly took with him upon leaving the White House. Prosecutors say that Trump repeatedly avoided turning over boxes of records despite requests from the National Archives and Records Administration and, later, from the FBI.
“Why didn’t he give them back? It’s because he thinks those are his,” Grisham told CNN.
“He’s like a child holding on to his little toy train and nobody is going to take it from him,” she said.
The nearly 50-page indictment prepared by special counsel Jack Smith spells out in detail how Trump and an aide, Walt Nauta, allegedly defied authorities.
According to Smith, Trump transported dozens of boxes filled with privileged information to Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Florida, even though NARA maintains legal custody over all records from a former president’s administration, according to federal law. Prosecutors say that Trump would show off certain pages to people he wanted to impress.
Urged by his attorneys to give NARA the missing documents, Trump allegedly responded, “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?”
In January 2022, Trump’s representatives turned over just 15 of the boxes in response to NARA’s requests.
His lawyers attempted to comply with a subpoena for the rest of the materials in June 2022 but, according to prosecutors, Trump worked with Nauta to hide much of it.
When one attorney for Trump subsequently went through boxes in storage at the Mar-a-Lago estate to look for classified papers to put in a folder to give to the FBI, not all of them were there. That attorney said Trump made “a plucking motion” as he suggested the attorney “take [the folder of classified documents] with you to your hotel room and if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.”
On Aug. 8, 2022, the FBI served a search warrant on Trump’s Florida estate to ensure all the confidential documents had been recovered. They came away with over 100 more documents with classification markings.
Photos contained in the indictment show dozens of boxes that Trump had stored at Mar-a-Lago: on a stage in a ballroom, crammed next to a bathroom toilet and strewn across a floor after a stack of boxes fell.
Grisham said she recognized the bathroom in the photograph.
“That bathroom particularly was off a room that guests would play bridge and poker in,” she said on CNN. “And so I guarantee when there were guests in that room that door wasn’t locked.”
Other doors would not have been locked, either, she said.
“I was even surprised for Trump that they could have been so, so careless with those documents,” she said.
Grisham told the network she believed the president felt “absolutely dejected” as he headed to the federal courthouse for his arraignment — his second in two months.
“He thinks that it’s not elegant.”