Eric Trump says his dad is 'a very, very neat guy' and doesn't leave 'documents staged all over an office floor'
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- Eric Trump rebuked the DOJ for releasing a photo of top-secret documents on the floor at Mar-a-Lago.
- Trump said his father was a "very, very neat guy" and would not leave files on the floor.
- Trump also raged last week about the photo and how it made him appear sloppy.
Eric Trump, former President Donald Trump's son, on Tuesday defended his father over the FBI's raid of Mar-a-Lago.
Commenting on a photo shared by the Department of Justice that showed some of the classified documents found at the Florida residence, Eric Trump told Fox News: "These pictures — you think my father happened to just leave documents all over his office floor?"
"I can tell you my father is a very, very neat guy. He doesn't leave documents staged all over an office floor," he added.
The elder Trump raged about the same photo last week, making several Truth Social posts on the issue.
"There seems to be confusion as to the 'picture' where documents were sloppily thrown on the floor and then released photographically for the world to see, as if that's what the FBI found when they broke into my home. Wrong!" Trump wrote.
"They took them out of cartons and spread them around on the carpet, making it look like a big 'find' for them," he wrote. "They dropped them, not me — Very deceiving…" he added.
In another post, the former president also complained about how the documents were placed "haphazardly all over the floor." "Perhaps pretending it was me that did it!" he wrote.
The DOJ's photo was released as part of a court filing on the Mar-a-Lago search.
In the picture, several folders bearing the phrase "top secret" were placed on the floor next to redacted letters that bore a White House letterhead. Also seen was a framed copy of a 2019 TIME magazine cover that Trump appeared to have kept at his Florida home despite its unflattering depiction of him.
During the search of Mar-a-Lago, the FBI seized 11 sets of classified documents, including some marked "top secret" and others that may have concerned nuclear weapons, per The Washington Post. According to the warrant for the search, the DOJ is looking into whether Trump broke any of three federal laws — including the Espionage Act — by keeping the documents at his Florida residence.
According to the DOJ, some of these seized files were so sensitive that FBI agents and DOJ attorneys involved in the raid needed additional clearances before they could look at them. This week, The Washington Post reported that the documents seized from Trump's home contained information about a foreign government's nuclear defenses.