Mar-a-Lago has been in the news for much of the past 11 months because back in August, the Federal Bureau of Investigation searched the Palm Beach resort and private home of Donald Trump in an attempt to recover highly classified government documents that the ex-president was trying to keep. There, the feds found that, among other things, said documents had been stored in a bathroom next to the toilet, and yada yada yada, Trump was later charged with a whole bunch of crimes in June. You know this story by now. What you may not know, however, is that classified documents weren’t the only materials that were not supposed to be at the resort, which their rightful owners have also encountered grave difficulty in retrieving.
Haaretz reports the entirely unrelated but nevertheless incredible story that antiquities belonging to Israel—including clay lamps and ancient ceramic candles, with the latter being “part of the national treasures collection”—were recently found at Mar-a-Lago, i.e. Donald Trump’s house. They had originally been shipped to the US for a 2019 Hanukkah event and then got “stuck” in the US due to the pandemic. At that point, the Israeli Antiquities Authority asked a Jewish American donor to “keep the items in his possession for a limited time, until they could be returned to Israel safely.” Fast-forward several years, and a few months ago, Israeli authorities learned that they’d ended up at Mar-a-Lago, where they still are, though not for Israel’s lack of trying.
According to Haaretz, Antiquities Authority director Eli Eskozido has attempted to go through multiple channels to get the items in question back, “thus far without success.” A source briefed on the situation told the outlet he would not be surprised if “the items Israel seeks are also eventually found in some bathroom there.”
To be fair, they might also be found in a storage room off the pool near the liquor supply closet.
A spokesman for Trump did not immediately respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.