One of Donald Trump’s lawyers who defended him during his first impeachment, senior White House advisor Eric Herschmann, told Trump that he faced investigation and legal liability if he did not return presidential records he was storing at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s senior fleecing facility and buffet, the New York Times reports.
A one-time federal prosecutor, Hershmann stressed to Trump the critical nature of returning the documents to avoid potential future legal issues in the future. The fact that a one-time Trump aide informed him of the criminality of holding the government documents further establishes Trump’s knowledge about the legal falsity of his claims that the papers were his personally.
Not long after Trump’s conversation with Herschmann, Trump arranged for 15 boxes of material to be returned to the National Archive in January 2022. In those boxes, the historians found 184 classified documents, prompting a subpoena which resulted in more being turned in June 2022, but investigators had to get a court-issued search warrant in August to search the property and secure thousands of pages of government documents.