During former President Donald J. Trump’s years in the White House, his aides began to refer to the boxes full of papers and odds and ends he carted around with him almost everywhere as the “beautiful mind” material.
It was a reference to the title of a book and movie depicting the life of John F. Nash Jr., the mathematician with schizophrenia played in the film by Russell Crowe, who covered his office with newspaper clippings, believing they held a Russian code he needed to crack.
The phrase had a specific connotation. The aides employed it to capture a type of organized chaos that Mr. Trump insisted on, the collection and transportation of a blizzard of newspapers and official documents that he kept close and that seemed to give him a sense of security.
One former White House official, who was granted anonymity to describe the situation, said that while the materials were disorganized, Mr. Trump would notice if somebody had rifled through them or they were not arranged in a particular way. It was, the person said, how “his mind worked.”
The contents of those boxes — and Mr. Trump’s insistence on hanging onto them — are now at the heart of a 38-count indictment against the former president and his personal aide, Walt Nauta. Prosecutors have accused Mr. Trump of obstructing their investigation into his possession of classified material after leaving office and putting national security secrets at risk.
His intense desire to keep the materials comes through in a text message cited in the indictment about the possibility of the boxes being moved after they were shipped to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence and private club.
When one employee asked the other if some could be moved to storage, the second employee, identified by multiple people as Mr. Trump’s former assistant Molly Michael, replied, “Woah!! Ok so potus specifically asked Walt for those boxes to be in the business center because they are his ‘papers.’”
At another point, she used the phrase “the beautiful mind paper boxes” in a text message, the indictment says.
Mr. Trump’s attachment to the contents of the boxes has now left him in serious legal peril, but it appears to be in keeping with a long pattern of behavior.
Mr. Trump has always hung onto news clippings, documents and other mementos, according to more than a half-dozen people who have worked for him over the years, including before his presidency.
His office at Trump Tower in New York, a corner space on the 26th floor, had a desk that was often piled high with papers. He kept keepsakes for decades, including a series of letters written to him by famous people more than 30 years ago, which he later published as a book that he sells for nearly $100 a copy.
Starting in the early months of his administration, Mr. Trump began using a cardboard box to bring papers and documents from the West Wing up to the residence at the end of the day.
In the White House, according to two people familiar with the practice, Mr. Trump was generally able to identify what was in the boxes most immediately around him. One of those people said he was “meticulous” in putting things in specific boxes — notwithstanding a picture released by the Justice Department showing classified documents spilled on the floor of a storage room at Mar-a-Lago.
Shortly after John F. Kelly took over as Mr. Trump’s chief of staff in July 2017, Mr. Kelly and other aides grew concerned that some documents were likely presidential records and might go missing if they were kept in the residence. They impressed upon Mr. Trump that the papers had to be tracked, but he was not especially interested, the people said.
Aides started examining the boxes to check for presidential records, but Mr. Trump still found ways to bring items to the residence. And the boxes began to multiply.
He could point to specific boxes that he wanted to take with him on Air Force One when he was traveling, and decline to take others, appearing aware of the contents inside the boxes he chose, both officials said.
The same was true when Mr. Trump left the White House, according to one person briefed on how he behaved. He knew the contents of the boxes around him. Some aides would periodically encourage him to condense the number he had in his immediate vicinity. Another person familiar with Mr. Trump’s habits said that when one box filled up, aides over the past two years would take it away and store it, bringing him a new one.
The charging document includes photos detailing just how many dozens of those cardboard boxes Mr. Trump had amassed. They are piled on a stage at Mar-a-Lago, stuffed into a storage room, even stacked in a bathroom, with some behind a shower curtain.
At his club in Bedminster, N.J., on Tuesday night, hours after he was arraigned in a Miami courtroom, Mr. Trump insisted to several hundred supporters that the boxes included “newspapers, press clippings” and “thousands and thousands of White House pictures,” as well as “clothing, memorabilia and much, much more.”
“I hadn’t had a chance to go through all the boxes,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s a long, tedious job, takes a long time. Which I was prepared to do, but I have a very busy life.”
That claim — that the boxes mostly contained personal items like clothing and that Mr. Trump was not aware of exactly what they held — is one he had made to his own advisers toward the second half of 2021.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers included a similar argument in a letter sent to Congress in April, claiming that Mr. Trump had little to do with how the documents were packed and shipped to Florida after he left office. In the letter, the lawyers claimed that “institutional processes, rather than intentional decision by Mr. Trump,” resulted in classified material leaving the White House.
“The White House staff simply swept all documents from the president’s desk and other areas into boxes, where they have resided ever since,” the letter said.
According to prosecutors, the notion that Mr. Trump was simply too busy to know all that he had is undercut by the facts.
As early as January 2021, as Mr. Trump was preparing to leave office after efforts to thwart the transfer of power to Joseph R. Biden Jr., he and his White House staff members, including Mr. Nauta, packed materials into boxes, the indictment says. “Trump was personally involved in this process,” it says.
On two occasions after he left office — once in late 2021 as he was reluctantly responding to demands from the National Archives to return the material he had taken from the White House and then later after a grand jury subpoena demanding the return of any classified documents still in his possession — Mr. Trump was brought a number of boxes to review, indicating that he was aware of their contents. Mr. Trump repeatedly told advisers the boxes of documents were “mine,” according to several people familiar with his remarks.
