In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's dishonesty and his record of disregarding the rule of law. Our next book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection.
Destruction of government documents is a crime. So is mishandling of classified material.
The National Archives and Records Administration confirmed on Friday that it found classified material among the boxes of White House documents that former President Donald Trump improperly took to Mar-a-Lago.
"NARA has identified items marked as classified national security information within the boxes" that have been returned to the agency from Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort, Archivist David S. Ferriero acknowledged in a letter to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
The agency has said that Trump returned 15 boxes of documents that were improperly taken from the White House. Earlier this month, the oversight committee opened an investigation into the records that were taken from the White House by the former president.
Asked by Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., who chairs the oversight committee, if the agency had reported Trump's actions to the U.S. Attorney General's office, Ferriero said: "Because NARA identified classified information in the boxes, NARA staff has been in communication with the Department of Justice."
In a letter to Ferriero, which was sent last week, Maloney said she was “deeply concerned” that the records had not been provided to the agency promptly at the end of the Trump administration. “They appear to have been removed from the White House in violation of the Presidential Records Act (PRA)," Maloney wrote.
The New York Times was first to report that some of the boxes contained classified information, and the Washington Post has reported they included documents marked at the "top secret" level.
