Several months after former President Donald Trump’s departure from the White House, the National Archives and Records Administration contacted Trump lawyers about missing presidential records.
In an email exchange, a lawyer for the National Archives emphasized that former White House counsel Pat Cipollone had determined that approximately two dozen boxes of material needed to be returned to the agency, but none of the boxes had been delivered.
TRUMP RETAINED OVER 700 PAGES WORTH OF CLASSIFIED RECORDS, NATIONAL ARCHIVES SAYS
“It is also our understanding that roughly two dozen boxes of original presidential records were kept in the Residence of the White House over the course of President Trump’s last year in office and have not been transferred to NARA, despite a determination by Pat Cipollone in the final days of the administration that they need to be,” Gary Stern, chief counsel for the National Archives, wrote in a May 2021 email, per the Washington Post.
Stern did not explain how he determined Trump still had the boxes the agency was seeking, according to the report. He reportedly noted that the National Archives was aware that correspondence Trump had with former President Barack Obama and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was missing.
Cipollone was tasked with representing Trump to the National Archives, according to the report. Since Trump’s departure from the White House, Cipollone has emerged as a key figure in the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation.
The email sheds light on how early the National Archives became aware that it was missing presidential records from Trump. The Presidential Records Act of 1978 requires presidents to preserve documents and deliver them to the agency by the end of their presidency.
“We know things are very chaotic, as they always are in the course of a one-term transition,” Stern said in the email to Trump’s lawyers, per the news outlet. “But it is absolutely necessary that we obtain and account for all presidential records.”
In the weeks that followed, Stern reportedly kept prodding Trump advisers to return the records. After weeks of back-and-forth discussion, Trump’s team capitulated and agreed to return 15 boxes of material to the agency in January. When archivists combed through the trove of documents, they discovered classified material and referred the material to the Justice Department.
More than 100 documents comprising roughly 700 pages were stashed in the 15 boxes, according to a letter between Trump’s legal team and the National Archives the agency published Tuesday.
After being alerted to the classified material, the DOJ initiated a review that led to officials retrieving material with classified markings from Mar-a-Lago in June, before the raid earlier this month.
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Trump has vehemently denied wrongdoing and decried the raid as being politically motivated ahead of his speculated 2024 debut. He may have breached the Espionage Act and obstructed justice, according to a warrant for the August search unsealed Friday. Trump has filed a motion seeking to stymie a DOJ review of the evidence seized in the raid until a special master is appointed to examine the evidence.
The DOJ has been ordered to produce a version of the affidavit for the raid with proposed redactions, along with a few other documents, before a federal court Thursday, and a judge is expected to make a determination on whether to divulge that to the public.
