Former President Donald Trump was required to hand over all White House documents with classified markings under a May 11 grand jury subpoena, regardless of whether he believed he’d declassified them, the Justice Department said in a footnote of a recent court filing.
Months before the Aug. 8 search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, his lawyers asserted in negotiations that the former president had “absolute authority to declassify documents,” although they didn’t claim he had actually done so, the Justice Department said in an Aug. 29 filing made public Friday night in Washington, where the grand jury had been convened.
“The government notes that the subpoena sought documents ‘bearing classification markings,’ and therefore a complete response would not turn on whether or not responsive documents had been purportedly declassified,” a lawyer with the DOJ’s National Security Division said in the filing.
