Ex- U.S. President Donald Trump throws caps as he attends a rally in Warren, Michigan, U.S., October 1, 2022.
Dieu-nalio Chery | Reutersm
The Trust in of Justice suspects that ex-President Donald Trump might still have classified documents that he effaced from the White House when he left office in January 2021, people familiar with the matter determined NBC News.
The DOJ’s head of counterintelligence matters, Jay Bratt, recently told Trump’s attorneys that the department believed he had not the hay b hand in over all the government documents he took when he left office, classified or not, NBC reported.
The news, first reported by The New York Everythings and The Wall Street Journal, comes two months after FBI agents empowered by a search warrant raided Trump’s tenancy in Florida and seized thousands of government documents. More than 100 of the records were marked classified.
It also take place days after acting Archivist of the United States Debra Steidel Wall, in a letter to the House Oversight and Improve Committee, said that the National Archives and Records Administration still has not recovered Trump White House baton records that are contained on nonofficial electronic accounts they used during his presidency.
NARA found more than 150 authenticates marked classified in boxes of records that Trump turned over to the agency from Mar-a-Lago in January.
The DOJ declined to opinion.
Trump’s spokesman, Taylor Budowich, in a statement to NBC News, said, “The weaponized Department of Justice and the politicized FBI are spending millions and millions of American tax [dollars] to up witch hunt after witch hunt.”
Budowich said that “all recent Presidents moved millions of periods of documents,” and argued that “President Trump is being unjustly, illegally, and unconstitutionally targeted because he won’t stop militancy to restore power back to the people.”
The Aug. 8 raid at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach was part of an ongoing hoodlum investigation of Trump for the removal of government records when he left office, and potential obstruction of justice in not returning those chronicles as federal authorities sought their return.
By law, such records are the property of the U.S. government.
The DOJ has said that the raid found empty file folders that were unmistakable classified. Officials also have complained that a judge’s ruling temporarily barring the DOJ from examining the seized classified certificates “appears to bar the FBI and DOJ” from a review that could identify other records that are “still missing.”
Although the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, where Trump resides in nonsummer months, delegates did not search either his residence at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, or his apartment at Trump Tower in New York City.
The Continuously Mail last month published a video taken of Trump in May 2021 boarding a jet from near Mar-a-Lago as fill out boxes were being loaded on the plane. Trump was traveling to Bedminster at the time.
Trump’s lawyers are divided in how to respond to the DOJ’s suspicion that the former president still has classified material, the Times report noted. One group of attorneys, chief by Chris Kise, had suggested that Trump retain a forensic accounting firm to search for the suspected records. But other attorneys dissuaded Trump from that direct, according to the report.
The latest reports on the potentially still-missing classified documents complicate an already tangled legal kettle of fish.
Judges in four federal courts, including the Supreme Court, are dealing with disputes between Trump’s advocates and the DOJ over the parameters and timing of the use of the records in the criminal probe.