There’s No Argument About What Trump Did. The Only Argument Is Over What to Do About It.

The already-famous FBI photo of the classified documents Donald Trump was keeping in his home at Mar-a-Lago did not, if we’re being honest, have to be included in the Justice Department response to Trump’s request that a court appoint a special master be appointed to filter out any personal or privileged material from all the documents the FBI seized when it searched Mar-a-Lago earlier this month. The issues involved in the special-master case largely have to do with process — whether Trump has standing, whether there’s a legal basis for appointing a special master, whether the request to appoint a special master is moot given, that according to the DoJ, all the documents have already been vetted. The question of whether some of the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago were classified is, in some sense, tangential.

But the picture is still important, because it captures in a single image what had become undeniable: when he left the White House, Trump took a bunch of documents that were not his to take, and refused to give them back despite repeated requests from the National Archivist, negotiations with the Department of Justice, and a subpoena. That is to say, he broke the law — or, to be accurate, multiple laws.