To determine if Trump had retained any material from his time in office, the Chair of the House Oversight Committee asked the National Archives and Records Administration to review the documents and determine if they are missing.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D. New York), chair of the committee. wrote a letter to NARA this week making the request. Maloney’s request leaves open the possibility that more documents may be found at the Palm Beach, Florida, residence of the former president — or even possibly at other Trump properties, as some of his former aides have alleged.
Maloney, citing Trump’s repeated efforts to hold on to the documents and to evade any attempts by the feds to retrieve them, wrote that the Oversight Committee “is concerned that, given this pattern of conduct, Mr. Trump may continue to retain presidential records at non-secure locations.” These documents may include “classified material that could endanger our nation’s security and other important records documenting Mr. Trump’s activities at the White House,” she added.
NARA apparently shares this concern with Maloney — in her letter, she cited a phone call that Oversight Committee staff had with the agency on August 24, in which aides from NARA informed the committee that “the agency is not certain whether all presidential records are in its custody.”
Maloney’s letter specifically asked NARA to “seek a personal certification from Donald Trump that he has surrendered all presidential records that he illegally removed from the White House after leaving office,” and that the agency “conduct an urgent review of presidential records recovered from the Trump White House to assess whether presidential records remain unaccounted for and potentially in the possession of the former president.”
Maloney stated that NARA should complete the request by September 27, as requested by the Oversight Committee.
Since the beginning of the year Mar-a-Lago has more than 300 classified documentsThrough multiple searches and retrieval procedures, the property was identified. Last month’s search of the property yielded over 11,000 government documentsAround 100 documents had classified markings. Some documents were so classified that even the FBI could not access them. many high-ranking national security officials didn’t know about them. These also contained information on the nuclear weapons capabilities a foreign country.
A total of forty-eight empty folders with no markings were also discovered last month. This led many to wonder what happened to the material contained within them.
NARA has asked Trump to return these documents. Since his last days at the White House. The agency kept asking for them to be returned after Trump’s departure. They are not the property of the former president, but belong to the federal government. After nearly a year of being denied retrieval attempts, the agency threatened Trump to get Congress involved. Trump finally relented and allowed NARA to retrieve some documents on January 20, 2022.
After completing the retrieval process, the agency discovered some of the documents it received back were classified and informed the Department of Justice. The spring saw Trump served with a subpoena by the department requesting another retrieval. This was done in June. A Trump lawyer stated on his behalf that he didn’t have any additional classified documents on the premises or in possession.
Evidence from an informant surveillance footageAfter that event, the DOJ was convinced that this was not true and the FBI conducted a search of Mar-a-Lago in August to find the remaining documents.
