On Friday, the National Data and Archives Administration informed House Democrats that it had not yet obtained all the records from Trump administration officials that it was legally required to and that it would speak with the Justice Department before taking any further action.
Debra Steidel Wall, the acting archivist of the United States, claimed in a letter to Carolyn Maloney, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, that some White House employees used “non-official electronic messaging accounts” for work-related communications that weren’t copied or forwarded into their official accounts as required by law.
She told Congress, “We do know that we do not have custody of everything we should, but there is no simple way to achieve total responsibility.
The Archives “has been able to receive such documents from a number of officials” and “will continue to seek the return of comparable sorts of presidential materials from former officials,” Wall said in his letter.
According to the Federal Documents Act, NARA would “when appropriate, confer with the Department of Justice on whether to begin an action for the recovery of records improperly deleted.”
Peter Navarro, a prominent trade advisor to former President Donald Trump, was the target of a lawsuit brought by the Justice Department in August to get official email records that were received from his personal email account. According to Navarro’s attorneys, he “instructed his lawyers to retain all such papers” and “expects the government to follow conventional procedures in good faith to enable him to submit information,” according to a statement to The Hill in August.
Maloney called it “outrageous” that the documents, which belong to the U.S. government and have been missing for 20 months since the end of the Trump administration, in response to Wall’s letter.
In a statement, she said that by refusing to surrender presidential documents as required by law, the former president Trump and his top staff had shown a complete contempt for the law and for the security of our country.
The Justice Department is investigating Trump’s handling of private documents that he took from the White House to Mar-a-Lago in South Florida near the conclusion of his administration.
According to the Justice Department, materials designated classified were discovered in 14 of the 15 boxes of data the Archives acquired from Mar-a-Lago. 184 papers with classification marks, including 67 tagged confidential, 92 marked secret, and 25 marked top secret, were included in the batch of sensitive materials.
Following a search warrant execution at Mar-a-Lago in August, the FBI discovered approximately 100 additional documents with classification markings in a storage room on the property and in desks in Trump’s office. In June, a representative of Trump turned over an additional 38 distinct documents with classification markings to the Justice Department.
According to the Justice Department, Trump is being looked at for improperly removing and storing classified information in unauthorized locations, as well as for unlawfully concealing or removing official documents.
But according to Trump’s attorneys, the inquiry against him is “unusual and wrong.”