Trump stays mum about why he took classified documents

Was it carelessness, curiosity, a hoarding tendency, a belief he had the right, or something more sinister? The 11,000 classified documents, some of them so secret their distribution was minimal, which are now at the heart of a legal tussle between the US Justice Department and Donald Trump's lawyers, have a huge story to tell. I like the comments made by a lawyer specialising in national security law that appear in The Hill. He said the documents either contain information which can hurt Trump and he doesn't want anyone else to see it, or they contain information that can hurt other people and he wants to have it or they contain information that other people would want and would need to come to him to get it. The last possibility is the sinister one. Did Trump have a devious motivation for removing all these secret documents from the White House and storing them at his residence in Mar-a-Lago? Was he prepared to use the secret documents to gain him some advantage? This is all speculation because Trump and his lawyers have not given any explanation why the former president kept the documents at his residence in Florida. All they have said is that he had declassified them as was his right. But while it is possible for a president to declassify documents it has to be part of a government-wide process to ensure that nothing damaging to national security is released. A president on his own doesn't know whether a document contains hidden secrets, such as sources for information. That's why the whole intelligence community would be involved in a proposal to declassify secret documents. So until Trump or his lawyers come up with a proper explanation for why the 45th president removed them and stored them at his home, I think it is justified to speculate that he may have had some nefarious motivation in mind. If that is true and can be proved then the former president is in deep trouble.