The National Archives and Documentation Service (NARA) asked former President Donald Trump for the return of documents more than a year before the raid on his private resort Mar-a-Lago. That writes The Washington Post Wednesday Night. The newspaper has a email in hands from May 2021. In it, the head of the institution, Gary Stern, asks for the papers.
In the email, Stern wrote that the NARA had determined that some 24 boxes of official presidential documents were missing. The archive also wrote to Trump’s “immediate assistance” that his lawyers need to get the boxes back. One of Trump’s lawyers is said to have ordered the papers to be handed over to the archive just before the president’s departure in January 2021. However, that had not yet happened at the time of mail in May 2021.
Stern noted that there were two specific documents the archive couldn’t find: the original correspondence between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and a letter former President Barack Obama left for Trump on his first day in office. .
Just before Trump left office, Kim Jong-un’s letters were put in a folder for the president, Stern wrote. However, this never ended up in the archive, as required by law. “It is essential that these original documents are handed over as quickly as possible,” Stern said.
According to sources who The Washington Post In the fall of 2021, the chief of the archive made several attempts to get hold of the documents. Only after he threatened to inform Congress about the papers would Trump have cooperated.
Mar-a-Lago
Earlier this month, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago, a Trump country home in Florida. Among the papers were several documents that Trump should not have taken with him. These should have been formally filed by the NARA after he left office. In total, about twenty boxes of material were seized.