Back in early June, Donald Trump’s legal team discussed with the US Department of Justice documents stored at the estate of the former president of Mar-a-Largo, where FBI agents raided.
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Trump’s lawyer, Christina Bobb, said the FBI seized about a dozen boxes from a basement storage facility and that the search warrant indicated that the bureau was investigating a possible violation of the law regarding the handling of classified materials. Trump’s lawyers had already checked two to three dozen boxes of materials in the vault earlier this year for presidential records, Bobb said, and “several pages” fit that description.
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Later, Bobb and another Trump lawyer, Evan Corcoran, met with a senior Justice Department official, who has not been named. Federal officials reviewed the boxes of materials, the lawyer added. According to her, representatives of the department said that, in their opinion, the vault in which the documents are stored was not adequately protected. Bobb also indicated that Trump’s aides installed a lock on the vault and that FBI agents broke it.
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A source close to Trump said the ex-president personally showed Justice Department officials the room where the documents were kept during a meeting in June. Trump has previously had to return 15 boxes of documents that the National Archives and Records Administration believes were improperly removed from the White House.
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Subsequently, the National Archives asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Trump’s handling of the White House documents violated federal law.
