The numbers make clear the large volume of secret government documents recovered months ago from Trump’s Florida estate, long before FBI officials returned there with a search warrant on Aug. 8 and removed an additional 11 sets of classified files. The warrant reveals an FBI investigation into possible illegal possession of the records as well as obstruction of justice. Details of the documents were included in a May 10 letter in which Acting Archivist Debra Steidel Wall told Trump’s lawyer, Evan Corcoran, that the Biden administration would not honor the former president’s protective claims of executive privilege over the documents. A vehicle with flags in support of Trump drives outside the Paul G. Rogers Federal Courthouse in West Palm Beach, Florida, on August 18. (Lynne Sladky/The Associated Press) Corcoran had weeks earlier requested additional time to review the materials in the boxes before the National Archives turned them over to the FBI so he could determine whether any particular document was subject to executive privilege and therefore exempt from disclosure, according to the letter.
No privilege, says the Biden administration
The letter was released Tuesday on the National Archives website. It was published Monday night on a website started by John Solomon, who was appointed by Trump in June as one of his National Archives representatives and is a Trump ally and conservative journalist. The archivist’s letter states that the Justice Department has found “no precedent for a former President asserting executive privilege against a sitting President to prevent the latter” from obtaining from the National Archives presidential records belonging to the federal government that needed for current government business. Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas, Texas on August 6. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images) As a result, the letter said, claims of executive privilege will not be upheld and the FBI will have access to the documents within days. The National Archives asked the Justice Department to investigate after it said it found classified material among 15 boxes of files it recovered from Mar-a-Lago that it said should have been turned over by Trump at the end of his term to the White House. House. .
Some top secret secrets
In the letter, Archivist Wall writes that in those boxes, the National Archives had located items marked as classified at the top secret level as well as information about special access programs. It says the files included more than 100 classified documents, “consisting of more than 700 pages,” and cites an excerpt from separate mail from the Justice Department’s National Security Division that says “access to the material is not only necessary for the purposes of the ongoing criminal investigation” but also for “assessment of the possible damage” resulting from the way the documents are transported and stored. Corcoran did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment on the letter.
