New sources reveal childish reason Trump fought to keep classified documents

President Donald Trump, next to Jared Kushner, salutes as a U.S. flag is raised on a new flagpole installed on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S. June 18, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

A newly released memo this week revealed suspicions that President Donald Trump illegally retained classified documents in order to profit from them, but according to new sources who spoke to MS NOW, the reason might have actually been something simpler, and more childish: his own ego.

MS NOW previously reported on the memo from Special Counsel Jack Smith's team suggesting Trump had a profit motive for retaining those documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort after leaving the White House the first time. The memo contained a progress report on the ongoing federal investigation against Trump from Jan. 2023 and did not divulge which specific business interests were involved in the supposed motive.

On Friday, MS NOW published a follow-up report on Friday, noting that despite those initial suspicions, "Smith and his team later concluded they could not prove this was his motive." As of a few months after that progress report, evidence was quietly being presented to a Florida grand jury, and "Smith and his prosecutors determined their clearest conclusion was that Trump kept the records out of an egotistical belief that he should be allowed to keep them," two people familiar with the case told the outlet, also adding that Trump was particularly fixated on the classified materials because he thought they were "cool."

"But after copious work by Smith’s team, the people said, prosecutors increasingly believed the most they could prove was that Trump erroneously believed he should be allowed to keep any record he wanted and some of the documents were simply 'cool,'" MS NOW's report explained. "For example, investigators were surprised to learn Trump asked his briefers if he could keep the leather-bound covers of some of his classified briefings that carried the embossed title, 'The President,' according to one person familiar with the finding."

As MS NOW noted in its report, Smith and his team did not necessarily need to establish any motive in order to convict Trump and his associates of mishandling classified documents. Nevertheless, the team was said to be "laser-focused" on establishing it anyway, so that it could be presented to a jury at trial.

The memo that the outlet previously reported on gained significant attention this week after it was cited by Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin in a letter to Pam Bondi, arguing that it "reveals a President of the United States who may have sold out our national security to enrich himself."

"The memo was written in Smith’s early days in office to prepare Smith to brief then-Attorney General Merrick Garland on the investigation’s progress. The memo said the briefing was scheduled for Jan. 13, 2023," MS NOW explained further. "Smith’s team planned to update the attorney general on investigative steps they took, meetings they had with FBI supervisors in the Washington field office and the priority investigative tasks they later gave the investigators."

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