WASHINGTON-
The National Archives has recovered 100 documents bearing classified marks, totaling more than 700 pages, from an initial batch of 15 boxes recovered from Mar-a-Lago earlier this year, according to new government public correspondence with the Trump’s legal team.
The figures clearly show the large volume of secret government documents recovered months ago from former US President Donald Trump’s estate in Florida, long before FBI officials returned with a search warrant on August 8. and only remove 11 other sets of classified documents. The warrant also reveals an FBI investigation into potential illegal withholding of records as well as obstruction of justice.
The numbers on the documents were included in a May 10 letter in which acting archivist Debra Steidel Wall told a Trump lawyer, Evan Corcoran, that the Biden administration would not honor the former’s claims. president regarding executive privilege over documents.
Corcoran had asked weeks earlier for additional time to review the documents in the boxes before the Archives turned them over to the FBI so it could determine whether any were subject to executive privilege and therefore exempt from disclosure, according to the letter.
The letter was made public Tuesday on the National Archives and Records Administration website. It was posted late Monday on a website launched by John Solomon, who was appointed by Trump in June to be one of his designated representatives at the Archives and who is a Trump ally and a conservative journalist.
The archivist’s letter says the Justice Department has found ‘no precedent for an assertion of executive privilege by a former president against an incumbent president to prevent the latter’ from obtaining from the presidential archives records belonging to the government. federal and which are necessary for day-to-day business. government business. As a result, according to the letter, claims of executive privilege would not be honored and the FBI would have access to the documents within days.
The Archives had asked the Justice Department to investigate after it said it had located classified documents among the 15 boxes of documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago that they said should have been turned over by Trump at the end. of his term in the White House.
In the letter, Archivist Wall writes that in those boxes, the Archives had identified items marked as classified at the top secret level as well as information about special access programs.
It says the files included 100 documents with classified marks, “comprising over 700 pages” and cites an excerpt from separate correspondence from the Justice Department’s National Security Division saying that “access to documents n “is not only necessary for the purposes of our ongoing criminal investigation” but also for an “assessment of potential damage” resulting from the transport and storage methods of the documents.
Corcoran did not immediately return messages seeking comment on the letter.
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Associated Press writer Farnoush Amiri in Washington contributed to this report.