WASHINGTON — The National Archives informed Congress Friday that members of Trump’s White House have still not turned over all presidential records and signaled there could be legal consequences for those who do not comply.
In a letter sent to the House Oversight Committee, Debra Steidel Wall, the acting U.S. archivist, said the archive was working to retrieve email messages from some anonymous White House officials who had used email accounts and personal email to conduct official business.
Ms Wall wrote that the archive would consult with the Department of Justice on whether to ‘take action to recover unlawfully deleted material’.
“While there is no easy way to establish absolute liability, we know we don’t have custody of everything we should,” Ms. Wall wrote to Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, New York Democrat and Chair of the Oversight Committee.
Ms Wall cited an August Justice Department filing to retrieve official email records from the personal account of Peter Navarro, a former Trump adviser. Mr. Navarro faces contempt of Congress charges after he refused to comply with a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
In her letter, Ms. Wall declined to say whether former President Donald J. Trump had turned over all presidential records in his possession.
“Regarding the second question of whether former President Trump has turned over all presidential records, we respectfully refer you to the Department of Justice in light of their ongoing investigation,” she wrote.
“The National Archives has confirmed to the Oversight Committee that it has still not received all of Trump’s White House presidential records,” Ms. Maloney said in a statement. “Presidential records are the property of the American people, and it is outrageous that these records remain untraceable for 20 months after former President Trump’s departure.”
Ms Maloney had requested a formal assessment of the archives to find out which presidential documents remained untraceable and whether the archives believed any were potentially still in Mr Trump’s possession.
Ms Maloney also requested that the archives “seek personal certification from Donald Trump that he has turned over all presidential records that he unlawfully removed from the White House after leaving office”.
The federal government tried unsuccessfully for more than a year and a half to recover classified and sensitive documents from Mr. Trump before resorting to an August 8 search of his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, documents show. and government statements. by his lawyers.
Two months before the search, Mr. Trump’s attorney certified that all documents bearing classified marks had been returned and that “no copies, written notations or reproductions of any kind were retained”.
Yet FBI research found the former president still had more than 11,000 government records, including more than 100 with classified marks and documents with the highest classification marks, some linked to human intelligence sources. . There were other classified documents in Mr. Trump’s desk drawer.
The search also revealed 48 folders with classified marks that were empty. While it’s unclear why they were empty, the committee said, the apparent separation of classified documents and presidential files from their designated folders raised questions about how the documents were stored and whether sensitive documents would have could be lost or obtained by third parties.