After four years of U.S. President Donald Trump’s raging against his intelligence services, posting classified information to Twitter and announcing that he took the word of President Vladimir Putin of Russia over that of his own spies, perhaps the least surprising thing he did during his final days in office was ship boxes of sensitive material from the White House to his oceanside palace in Florida.
The FBI search of Mar-a-Lago on Monday was a dramatic coda to years of tumult between Trump and U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies. From Trump’s frequent rants against a "deep state” bent on undermining his presidency to his cavalier attitude toward highly classified information that he viewed as his personal property and would occasionally use to advance his political agenda, the relationship between the keepers of American secrets and the erratic president they served was the most poisoned of the modern era.
Trump’s behavior led to such mistrust within intelligence agencies that officials who gave him classified briefings occasionally erred on the side of withholding some sensitive details from him.