A personal note: I know former President Donald Trump. I have been privileged to visit him over the years in his Trump Tower office and residence before he was president. Later, I visited him in the Oval Office while he was president, along with my American Spectator colleagues Bob Tyrrell and Wlady Pleszczynski. While there, the president took us back to the inner recesses of two smaller rooms that provide the president of the moment with more private office space.

Fact: The former president is what is called in the vernacular a “neatnik.” I’m one as well, and the precise, literal dictionary definition is “a person who is compulsively neat.”

And “neatnik” perfectly describes Trump.

Which brings us to that now-infamous photo published by the FBI of classified documents at Mar-a-Largo — the documents spread willy-nilly all over the floor.

Hello? Hello?

There is no way Trump would have real-estate brochures or family photos spread around on the floor of his various offices, let alone classified documents that had been declassified. Never, say again never, in all my visits in various places was anything remotely out of place.

Which is to say that this photograph looks like a deliberate attempt to frame Trump for something he would never do in a thousand years even if he had never been president. Trump himself has insisted, “They dropped them, not me — Very deceiving.”

So, if true, the obvious question? Who specifically in the FBI removed those documents from whatever container they were in and willfully — deliberately — spread them all over the floor in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, taking a photograph to deliberately mislead the public? Something that in and of itself would be surely a violation of security procedures if not of federal law.

In fact, how were these documents handled by the FBI? Were the FBI agents wearing gloves as they handled them? If not, look to this information, supplied by the FBI itself on the official FBI website. The headline:

All About Fingerprints 

Fingerprints vary from person to person (even identical twins have different prints) and don’t change over time. As a result, they are an effective way of identifying fugitives and helping to prove both guilt and innocence.

Got it. So, it shouldn’t be hard for the bureau to identify the fingerprints on these documents and inform the American people just who in their Trump-raiding posse appears to have mishandled classified information and have tried to frame a former president with a phony, staged photograph.

This phony photograph really is just one more piece of evidence suggesting that the FBI has deliberately, willfully tossed aside the immense respect Americans once had for this once-great law-enforcement institution. Whether it was the anti-Trump shenanigans of the now-disgraced former agent Peter Strzok; or the corruption of former Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe; or the just-revealed resignation of Timothy Thibault, an assistant special-agent-in-charge, over allegations that he “helped shield Hunter Biden from criminal investigations into his laptop and business dealings”; or, now, what appears to be an abysmally clumsy attempt to use a faked photograph to frame Trump — the FBI is in serious trouble. And, assuming there is a Republican House majority after the midterm elections, the bureau should be investigated from top to bottom. (READ MORE: Judge Rejects DOJ Bid to Keep Trump Affidavit Sealed: Impeach Garland and Wray)

Bottom line?

Anybody who knows Donald Trump and has been privileged to spend time with him in various Trump domains knows that this photograph of classified documents spread helter-skelter on the floor looks like nothing more than a quite deliberate falsehood — a photographic lie designed to frame him with a manufactured, blatant untruth.

And the American people have a right to know exactly who did this.

Not to mention what their punishment will be.