Disgraced TheHill reporter turned columnist (because he failed to disclose pertinent information about his involvement in planning the Trump Ukrainian story with Rudy Giuliani et al and continued to report on it like he was an uninvolved journalist) John Solomon has disclosed some significant information about the efforts to retrieve documents from Donald Trump.

Solomon published a letter from the National Archives and Records Administration sent on May 10th to some of Trump’s lawyers–who are not part of the television crew of female attorneys who seem to spend all their time on Fox or Newsmax.  Although Solomon never discloses that he was appointed by Trump to be one of Trump’s “representatives to the National Archives,” Solomon does reveal some very embarrassing information that contradicts many of Trump’s claims regarding the records.

Among the information disclosed by Solomon’s publishing the letter:

• Trump’s lawyers, from a Baltimore law firm, were reviewing the documents to see if they should be returned to the government.  (They should be returned; they’re government property, not Trump’s.)  The lawyer, Evan Cocoran, is a former federal prosecutor who represented Steve Bannon in his contempt of Congress case.  (Reminder:  Bannon was found guilty of both charges and faces up to two years in prison.)
• the lawyers were reviewing the documents with Trump, so Trump cannot claim he does not know what subjects are covered by the material.
• the lawyers had asked for additional time to review the classified material to determine if it should be returned.
• some of the documents were marked as “SAP” or “Special Access Program,” a compartmented designation of top secret information considered to be the most secretive information in the government.
• Trump tried to assert “a protective assertion of executive privilege” if the Archivist did not grant additional time for the lawyers to review the documents.  The Archivist forwarded that claim up the chain of leadership, and President Biden deferred to the Archivist’s decision if he should support such a claim.  The Archivist, Debra Steidel Wall, denied Trump’s assertion of executive privilege because Trump is not the sitting president.
• the Archivist received a “request”–which by the tone of the letter, sounds more like a command–to turn over documents Trump had returned in January 2022 to the FBI so the FBI could review the documents to determine if Trump criminally possessed them and to ascertain if they would seek charges.
•  The Archivist states that she will deny the lawyers’ request for a delay and she will deliver the documents to the FBI by May 12th, two days after the letter was sent via email.  We know that weeks after this letter was sent, Trump’s lawyers Corcoran and Christina Bobb met with lawyers from the Department of Justice and Jay Bratt, the chief of the counterintelligence and export control section, when they showed the federal officials the boxes of additional classified documents Trump had stored in the basement.