On Thursday, former President Donald Trump’s legal team sent a letter to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Michael Turner regarding the Department of Justice’s investigation into the handling of classified documents found at Trump’s Mar-A-Lago residence.
In the letter, obtained by the Washington Post, Trump's legal team revealed that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) "declined to provide archival assistance to President Trump’s transition team," unlike the assistance offered to other former presidents, with the team adding that "NARA unfortunately has become overtly political."
"When President Trump left office, there was little time to prepare for the outgoing transition from the presidency. Unlike his three predecessors, each of whom had over four years to prepare for their departure upon completion of their second term, President Trump had a much shorter time to wind up his administration. White House staffers and General Service Administration ('GSA') employees quickly packed everything into boxes and shipped them to Florida. This was a stark change from the standard preparations made by GSA and National Archives and Records Administration ('NARA') for prior administrations," the letter stated.
The letter noted a press statement from NARA dated October 11, 2022, which listed every president since Ronald Reagan except for Trump as assuming "physical and legal custody of the Presidential records from the administrations."
"Interestingly, in its Press Statement NARA cites every recent President after Jimmy Carter as having received the same assistance with 'archival and security standards’. Yet, President Carter, the last President before President Trump to not receive archival assistance found documents with classification markings in his home, which he returned to NARA," the letter states.
The legal team stated that NARA "did not take custody of the documents and this made necessary the transfer of boxes of documents to President Trump’s heavily secured home at Mar-a-Lago," whether the administration’s departure from their previous routine was "intentional or a product of the compressed timeline."
"To be clear, had NARA offered President Trump the same assistance that it had provided to all previous Presidents, he would have accepted the offer and there would have been no reason to transfer the documents to Mar-a-Lago," the legal team stated.
Trump’s team later continued on to state that they had reviewed the entirety of the 15 boxes "since their return to NARA and has supervised searches of several different locations, some of which resulted in the discovery of a handful of additional marked documents."
They said that they have seen no indication that Trump knowingly possessed the documents or that he willfully broke any laws, and that "all indications are that the presence of marked documents at Mar-a-Lago was the result of haphazard records keeping and packing by White House staff and GSA. President Trump has directed us to immediately notify DOJ of the discovery of marked documents at Mar-a-Largo and we have faithfully done so."
The team stated that the decision to have the Department of Justice rather than the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) conduct a review of what happened "is probably the Executive Branch’s single biggest blunder in addressing this issue."
Despite the availability of far more appropriate support, such as from ODNI, the involvement of DOJ improperly predetermined that the matter should be handled as a criminal investigation. DOJ needlessly ratcheted up the adversarial nature of the matter, resulting in a waste of time and resources and a disturbing loss of public trust," the letter stated.
"This serves no legitimate purpose, as DOJ’s actions further erode constitutional rights while blindly compromising its own ability to provide a comprehensive account of what happened."
The letter also noted the discovery of classified documents at Biden’s offices and home, as well as the discovery of classified documents at former Vide President Mike Pence’s residence, and that the DOJ treated them very differently than in the case of Trump.
"What is consistent in all three of these cases is that the document handling procedures in the White House are flawed and DOJ is not the appropriate agency to conduct investigations pertaining to the mishandling or spillage of classified material," the letter stated.
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