A letter from the National Archives dated about 100 days after Donald Trump left office to Trump’s lawyers cited a statement by former White House Pat Cipollone, whom Trump appointed to be one of his liaisons to the National Archives, that the documents were government records, the Washington Post reports.
The earliest request known to date requesting hundreds of documents Trump took to Mar-a-Lago, the letter sent by Gary Stern, the chief counsel for the National Archives and Records Administration, stated unequivocally that the material should have gone to the Archives. “It is also our understanding that roughly two dozen boxes of original presidential records were kept in the Residence of the White House over the course of President Trump’s last year in office and have not been transferred to NARA, despite a determination by Pat Cipollone in the final days of the administration that they need to be.”
Trump and his apologists have claimed that Trump was in “complete compliance” with the law and had “fully cooperated” with the National Archives in its quest to get Trump’s White House records. This new letter shows that the efforts to get the documents, which culminated in an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago two weeks ago, had been going on for at least 15 months, much longer than the eight months Trump apologists have claimed.