Partisan Democrats weren't the ones who referred former President Donald Trump to the Justice Department for taking documents from the White House, the National Archives said in a statement on Tuesday. Politico posted the statement from the Archives, responding to Trump's ongoing claims at political rallies and on his personal social media site.
“At no time and under no circumstances were NARA officials pressured or influenced by Committee Democrats or anyone else,” Acting National Archivist Debra Steidel Wall wrote in a letter to congressional Republicans.
Wall said that congressional inquiries about the DOJ should be answered by them, not the NARA.
According to their statement, the Justice Department requested the Archives “not share or otherwise disclose to others information related to NARA’s recovery of the 15 boxes at this time in order to protect the integrity of DOJ’s ongoing work,” Wall wrote.
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In Feb. 2022, it was reported that the National Archives officially referred the documents issue to the Justice Department.
Longtime Archives lawyer Gary Stern reached out to the point person Trump had appointed to be designated as a point of contact about the record-keeping issue in May 2021, only to be rebuffed.
"We know things are very chaotic, as they always are in the course of a one-term transition,” Stern told Trump lawyers. “But it is absolutely necessary that we obtain and account for all presidential records.”
On May 10, 2022, the National Archives responded to a letter by Donald Trump's lawyer Evan Corcoran making it clear that they discovered "classified national security information up to the level of Top Secret and including Sensitive Compartmented Information and Special Access Program materials" after taking back the 15 boxes from Trump in Jan. 2022.
"NARA informed the Department of Justice about that discovery, which prompted the Department to ask the President to request that NARA provide the FBI with access to the boxes at issue so that the FBI and others in the Intelligence Community could examine them," the Archives letter continued. "On April 11, 2022, the White House Counsel’s Office—affirming a request from the Department of Justice supported by an FBI letterhead memorandum—formally transmitted a request that NARA provide the FBI access to the 15 boxes for its review within seven days, with the possibility that the FBI might request copies of specific documents following its review of the boxes."
Trump has alleged that the National Archives is corrupt and that they are the ones planting or destroying documents, not him. Trump was warned by his White House lawyers that if he didn't turn over the documents he could be in legal trouble. Those lawyers, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and his deputy Patrick Philbin, have spoken to the FBI.
Former Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann also made it clear to Trump after he left office that he must hand over documents.
"The meeting between Mr. Herschmann and Mr. Trump has not been previously reported, and it adds to the picture of Mr. Trump’s interactions with several people about returning the documents in the months before the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of material in January of this year," wrote New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. "When they went through the boxes, officials at the archives discovered that they contained nearly 200 individual classified documents."
Read the full letter from the Archives here.
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