Former aides recall secretively packing boxes during Trump's last days in White House because he thought he'd stay in office

• In the chaos after the 2020 election, White House aides were secretly packing Trump's boxes.
• Ex-Trump officials told The New York Times they didn't recall classified material going into boxes.

Aides to then President Donald Trump were frantically and secretly packing the president's things behind his back at the end of his presidency, because Trump insisted he wouldn't be leaving the White House after the 2020 election, according to a report by The New York Times.

It's the latest media reporting about the chaotic transition from the Trump administration to the Biden administration, one that now is at the center of an unprecedented federal criminal investigation of the former president.

According to the Times, the former Trump officials who were interviewed said they didn't recall seeing classified material going into boxes. But several of the people said that the packing had to happen in secret "to avoid being ordered to stop by Mr. Trump, who continued to assert that he had won the election."

NBC News reported in August that once Trump realized his time as commander in chief was up, he hurriedly stuffed document after document into banker boxes and shipped them to his Palm Beach estate. Politico last month cited former aides who said the Oval Office and an adjacent private dining room only got packed up the weekend before Trump left the White House.

"In my entire time of briefing President Bush, he asked to keep only one thing, which was a chart of those responsible for 9/11, which he then, when we captured or killed somebody on that list, he would cross off," Michael J. Morell, a former deputy director of the CIA and an agency analyst who delivered President George W. Bush's daily intelligence briefing, told the New York Times.

Morell told the Times that Bush was careful when it came to sensitive materials, never taking a single chart out of his office. Other intelligence personnel told The New York Times that Trump didn't have the same sense of caution.

Trump would sometimes ask officials to retrieve documents for them, but they weren't always successful. If they asked for the documents back, Trump would assume they didn't trust him, according to John Bolton, a former Trump national security advisor.