The Justice Department twice declined to open a criminal investigation into allegations that Donald Trump destroyed presidential records, according to emails Bloomberg obtained.
The emails, released through Leopold’s long-running Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, show that in February 2022, weeks after Archives officials recovered 15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago, a special agent with the Archives’ inspector general’s office asked John Keller, then the deputy chief of DOJ’s public integrity section, whether his office wanted to take on a criminal investigation.
One of the matters the agent flagged: “President Donald Trump destroyed presidential records in violation of the” Presidential Records Act and another federal law.
The next day, Keller said his office wouldn’t open a criminal case “at this time.”
The referral drew on a memo from Gary Stern, then the Archives’ general counsel, who said he had warned the White House about the practice after news reports in 2018 but never received a formal response.
“We had thought that the practice would have stopped in light of the public attention, but learned during the transition that it continued throughout the administration,” Stern wrote.
The agent kept digging and, in late March 2022, reported preliminary findings to Keller. Only “a very small quantity” of the Trump administration records reviewed were torn, the agent wrote, and none so badly that they couldn’t be “realigned and put back together.” Some had been taped together, while others were stored in pieces in folders.
Keller again declined, saying the findings solidified his office’s “initial view” and noting that DOJ’s national security division was already examining the classified records issue. The decisions came under President Joe Biden’s Justice Department.
The emails also include a new claim: the agent wrote that one box of torn records was attributed to Matthew Sheehan, a former deputy counsel to Vice President Mike Pence. Sheehan told Bloomberg there’s no truth to it, saying he never damaged or tore records.
The White House dismissed the findings.
“The President and his team are focused on winning for the American people, not whether Bloomberg discovered a ripped piece of paper from 2022,” spokeswoman Lauren Bis said.
The emails surface as the Trump administration targets the FBI agents who worked the Mar-a-Lago case, firing about a dozen of them in February. Volume II of special counsel Jack Smith’s report on the documents case also remains under wraps after U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon permanently blocked its release that month.
Trump has long argued that the Presidential Records Act shielded his handling of documents, and his Justice Department declared the law unconstitutional in April, concluding he “need not further comply with its dictates.” In May, a federal judge ordered the White House to comply with the law.