Donald Trump's team might be still holding back some of the classified records removed from the White House during the former president's last days in office, US prosecutors have warned.
The prosecutors demanded an investigation into what they called a potential national security risk with the former president allegedly not returning all the papers even after searches at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
The revelation was made in a Justice Department court filing asking US district judge Aileen Cannon to let it continue reviewing about 100 classified records seized by the Federal Bureau of Information (FBI) at Mr Trump's estate last month.
The 45th president is under investigation for "illegally" removing the highly classified government records, including nuclear secrets of a foreign country, and hoarding them improperly at his Palm Beach resort after leaving office in January 2021.
"This motion is limited to... the seized classified records because those aspects of the order will cause the most immediate and serious harms to the government and the public," the department said in its court filing.
The department suggested there could be more classified records that were removed from the White House that the officials have not yet located.
The allegation comes just days after the investigators revealed that FBI agents found 90 empty folders that had once held extremely sensitive documents among the 27 boxes removed from Mr Trump's home.
The FBI recovered 48 empty folders labelled as classified and another 42 which indicated they should be returned to a staff secretary or military aide.
The prosecutors asked judge Cannon to not allow an independent arbiter, called a "special master," to review classified materials.
“Without a stay, the government and the public will also suffer irreparable harm from the undue delay to the criminal investigation,” prosecutors wrote in the filing.
“The injunction against using classified records in the criminal investigation could impede efforts to identify the existence of any additional classified records that are not being properly stored - which itself presents the potential for ongoing risk to national security,” they added.
Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee, on Monday temporarily blocked the federal investigators from reviewing the recovered records while a special master is appointed to review the material.
Prosecutors have asked the judge for a 15 September ruling and if denied they would move to file an appeal to the Atlanta-based 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals.
