Through the grand jury process, the National Archives provided federal prosecutors with copies of the documents received from former President Trump in January 2022. In late April, the source says, a federal grand jury began deliberating whether there was a violation of the Presidential Records Act or whether President Trump unlawfully possessed national security information. Earlier this year, they asked the Justice Department to investigate. He said the documents had inadvertently shipped to Florida during the six-hour transition period in which his belongings were moved.Īccording to the Justice Department source, the Archives saw things differently, believing that the former White House was stonewalling and continued to possess unauthorized material. He has previously said that he was returning any official records to the Archives, labeling any confusion in the matter as "an ordinary and routine process to ensure the preservation of my legacy and in accordance with the Presidential Records Act." He also claimed the Archives "did not 'find' anything" in what he had already been returned, suggesting that there was nothing sensitive. The basic outlines of the facts surrounding this timeline have been confirmed by the former president. Read more Will Trump Do Time? What It Would Take to Convict the Former President Ferriero said that in those materials, the Archives discovered items "marked as classified national security information," unleashing further inquiries as to whether Trump continued to possess classified material. In February, Archivist David Ferriero testified before Congress that his agency began talking with Trump's people right after they left office and that the Trump camp had already returned 15 boxes of documents to the Archives. The road to the raid began a year-and-a-half ago, when in the transition from the Trump administration to that of President Joe Biden, there were immediate questions raised by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) as to whether the presidential records turned over to the federal agency for historical preservation were complete or not. The raid had nothing to do with the January 6 investigation or any other alleged wrongdoing by the former president. The act, and concerns about the illegal possession of classified "national defense information" are the basis for the search warrant, according to the two sources. "Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined" $2,000, up to three years in prison or "shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States." Put in place after Watergate to avoid the abuses of the Nixon administration, the law imposes strict penalties for failure to comply.
government and not a president's private property. The act establishes that presidential records are the property of the U.S. (In response to the Hillary Clinton email scandal, Trump himself signed a law in 2018 that made it a felony to remove and retain classified documents.) EDT, two dozen FBI agents and technicians showed up at Donald Trump's Florida home to execute a search warrant to obtain any government-owned documents that might be in the possession of Trump but are required to be delivered to the Archives under the provisions of the 1978 Presidential Records Act.
"They wanted to punctuate the fact that this was a routine law enforcement action, stripped of any political overtones, and yet got exactly the opposite."Ī "Florida For Trump" flag being displayed outside Mar-a-Lago following the FBI search. "I know that there is much speculation out there that this is political persecution, but it is really the best and the worst of the bureaucracy in action," the official says. "What a spectacular backfire," says the Justice official. The effort to keep the raid low-key failed: instead, it prompted a furious response from GOP leaders and Trump supporters. Scott Olson/Getty ImagesįBI decision-makers in Washington and Miami thought that denying the former president a photo opportunity or a platform from which to grandstand (or to attempt to thwart the raid) would lower the profile of the event, says one of the sources, a senior Justice Department official who is a 30-year veteran of the FBI. The former president at a rally on Augin Waukesha, Wisconsin. A confidential informer told the FBI what documents Donald Trump was hiding at Mar-a-Lago, and where.
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