Trump kept 700 pages of classified documents, official letter shows

NEW YORK • Former US president Donald Trump took more than 700 pages of classified documents, including some related to the nation's most covert intelligence operations, to his private club and residence in Florida when he left the White House in January last year, according to a letter that the National Archives sent to his lawyers this year.

The letter, dated May 10 and written by the acting United States archivist, Ms Debra Steidel Wall, to one of Mr Trump's lawyers, Mr Evan Corcoran, described the state of alarm in the Justice Department as officials there began to realise how serious the documents were.

It also suggested that top department prosecutors and members of the intelligence community were delayed in conducting a damage assessment about the documents' removal from the White House as Mr Trump's lawyers tried to argue that some of them might have been protected by executive privilege.

The letter was disclosed on Monday night by one of Mr Trump's allies in the media, Mr John Solomon, who also serves as one of the former president's representatives to the archives. The archives then released the letter on Tuesday.

Investigators had recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Mr Trump's Mar-a-Lago home and private club, with each document potentially comprising multiple pages.

The letter from the archives was made public shortly after Mr Trump's lawyers filed a legal motion on Monday asking a federal judge in Florida to appoint an independent arbiter, known as a special master, to weed out any documents protected by executive privilege from a trove that was removed during an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago on Aug 8.

The National Archives letter could further implicate Mr Trump in a potential crime. It confirmed, for instance, that the former president had kept at Mar-a-Lago documents related to special access programmes, some of the nation's most closely held secrets, before the FBI searched the property.

The New York Times had previously reported that the investigation stemmed in part from an effort to recover documents related to special access programmes, a designation that is typically reserved for extremely sensitive operations carried out by the US abroad, or for closely held technologies and capabilities.

The search was more broadly part of an inquiry into whether the former president had wilfully retained highly sensitive national defence papers and obstructed a federal investigation. The letter also deepened the understanding of the back-and-forth between the archives and Mr Trump's lawyers over how to handle retrieving the papers.

NYTIMES