THERE ISN'T ONE:

"There seems to be a huge disconnect between what's actually happening -- a real live court case surrounding a real live investigation -- and what they're actually doing, which is treating it like they've treated everything else, recklessly and thoughtlessly," Chuck Rosenberg, a former U.S. attorney and F.B.I. official, said of Mr. Trump's approach. "And for an average defendant on an average case, that would be a disaster." [...]

The release on Aug. 26 of a partly redacted affidavit used by the Justice Department to justify its search of former President Donald J. Trump's Florida residence included information that provides greater insight into the ongoing investigation into how he handled documents he took with him from the White House. Here are the key takeaways:

The government tried to retrieve the documents for more than a year. The affidavit showed that the National Archives asked Mr. Trump as early as May 2021 for files that needed to be returned. In January, the agency was able to collect 15 boxes of documents. The affidavit included a letter from May 2022 showing that Trump's lawyers knew that he might be in possession of classified materials and that the Justice Department was investigating the matter.

The material included highly classified documents. The F.B.I. said it had examined the 15 boxes Mr. Trump had returned to the National Archives in January and that all but one of them contained documents that were marked classified. The markings suggested that some documents could compromise human intelligence sources and that others were related to foreign intercepts collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Prosecutors are concerned about obstruction and witness intimidation. To obtain the search warrant, the Justice Department had to lay out possible crimes to a judge, and obstruction of justice was among them. In a supporting document, the Justice Department said it had "well-founded concerns that steps may be taken to frustrate or otherwise interfere with this investigation if facts in the affidavit were prematurely disclosed."

Some of the Trump lawyers' efforts have also appeared ineffective or misdirected. Mr. Corcoran, in his May 25 letter, made much of Mr. Trump's powers to declassify material as president, and cited a specific law on the handling of classified material that he said did not apply to a president. The search warrant, however, said federal agents would be seeking evidence of three potential crimes, none of which relied on the classification status of the documents found at Mar-a-Lago; the law on the handling of classified material cited by Mr. Corcoran in the letter was not among them. [...]

Mr. Corcoran in particular has raised eyebrows within the Justice Department for his statements to federal officials during the documents investigation. People briefed on the investigation say officials are uncertain whether Mr. Corcoran was intentionally evasive, or simply unaware of all the material still kept at Mar-a-Lago and found during the Aug. 8 search by the F.B.I. [...]

Even before Mr. Corcoran joined the team, Mr. Trump's legal filings in various cases read like campaign rally speeches that he had dictated to his lawyers. The former president has a history of approaching legal proceedings as if they are political conflicts, in which his best defense is the 74 million people who voted for him in the 2020 election.

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