Archivists review documents
Trump also took secret papers home with him
02/19/2022, 02:19 am
Ex-President Trump has a lax approach to official documents. After his tenure, he stored boxes full of papers at his Florida estate. Including documents that are classified as secret, as the National Archives are now reporting.
Former US President Donald Trump also took government documents classified as secret or confidential with him to his private residence after the end of his term in office. The National Archives have also informed the Ministry of Justice about the seized documents, said the head of the agency, David Ferriero, in a letter to a parliamentary committee on Friday.
It was recently announced that the National Archives had found 15 boxes of official documents in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in the state of Florida and taken them to Washington. According to Ferriero’s letter to the relevant House Committee, a full cataloging of the material is not expected to be completed until late next week.
The documents also include “national security information classified as secret,” the agency chief said. In the United States, documents and communications from the President must be archived and preserved for posterity. According to US media reports, letters from North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un and a letter from Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama were also in the boxes.
Trump had confirmed the transfer of the boxes to the National Archives. “The papers were handed over without any problems, without any conflict and on a very friendly basis,” Trump said last week. Individual US media had reported that Trump had refused to release the material and only gave in after lengthy negotiations. In the letter to the committee, Ferriero also explained that some Trump officials had conducted government business through social media or messaging platforms whose content was not archived. The archive is trying to secure all communication content, he wrote.
The material, which was regularly handed over from the White House to the National Archives after the end of Trump’s term in office, also contained documents torn by the ex-president. Some of them were taped back together by White House officials, while others were handed over in pieces, it said.