More than a year before the Mar-a-Lago raid, the National Archives of the United States asked former President Donald Trump for a large number of documents to be returned. The Washington Post has an email from May 2021 in which the head of the institution asks Trump’s lawyers for the paperwork.
In the email, Gary Stern wrote, among other things, that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) had learned that some 24 boxes of official presidential documents had been stored in the residential area of the White House during the final year of Trump’s presidency. House. One of Trump’s lawyers is said to have ruled in the days before the president’s departure in January 2020 that the documents should be turned over to NARA, but that had still not happened at the time of the email in May 2021.
In his email, Stern pointed out that at least two documents were not clear where they were; a letter from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and a letter that Trump predecessor Barack Obama sent him at the start of his presidency.
Stern made several attempts to trace the documents in the fall of 2021, according to sources who spoke to The Washington Post. Trump would only have cooperated after Stern threatened to inform Congress about the situation. In January 2022, the former president handed over the first 15 boxes. The New York Times announced Monday that about 150 confidential documents were found in it. That was one of the factors leading up to the FBI’s August 8 raid on Mar-a-Lago. During that action and a voluntary handover in June, another 150 confidential documents were said to have surfaced.