The National Archives and Records Administration released another set of documents related to the storage of classified material and presidential documents at Mar-a-Lago by former President Donald Trump.
The 573-pages of emails posted Tuesday show how Gary Stern, NARA’s general counsel, pushed officials internally to set the record straight after news reports first surfaced last February claiming the agency “raided” Mar-a-Lago to obtain the presidential records Trump wrongfully took with him after he left office.
The first 150 pages all deal with NARA trying to get approval for a public statement related to reports from February that presidential records were not turned over to it. The records also show how the archives planned to respond to several inquiries about Trump’s missing presidential records from Democratic Representative Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, whose panel has been probing the issue.
The agency released the documents in response to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed by Bloomberg News and dozens of FOIA requests by other news organizations. In a letter attached to the documents that NARA sent to Bloomberg News, the agency said it plans to release additional records in January.
NARA previously released emails that showed how its top attorney tried to get a former Trump administration official to return correspondence between Trump and and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
NARA has located thousands of pages of documents related to its yearlong effort to get Trump officials to return records that were taken to Mar-a-Lago. But the vast majority of the records NARA has processed in response to the FOIA requests have been withheld by NARA, citing the Justice Department’s ongoing criminal investigation into the matter.
