The letter contains new details about what concerned the National Archives about the White House documents Trump was keeping at his Florida estate.
The National Archives identified over 100 documents with classification markings — including some identified as Top Secret and belonging to sensitive Special Access Programs — following its initial review of the 15 boxes of White House records first collected from Donald Trump's Florida residence in January 2022, according to a letter sent by the archives' acting archivist to an attorney for the former president.
"The Executive Branch here is seeking access to records belonging to, and in the custody of, the Federal Government itself," the letter to Trump's legal team stated, suggesting that the documents did not belong to the former president as he has been claiming. According to the Archives letter, Trump's legal team was trying to delay investigators from probing the more than 700 pages of records, based on a"protective assertion of executive privilege," but as the letter further states, President Biden's White House counsel's office formally asked that the FBI have access and left the question of whether executive privilege applied to these documents to Archives and Justice Department lawyers.
Wall also noted that there were other concerns about the records, too. Quoting from correspondence between Justice Department officials and Trump attorneys, she reminded Trump's lawyers that the Justice Department had told them,"There are important national security interests in the FBI and others in the Intelligence Community getting access to these materials."
The search of Trump's residence yielded even more boxes of potentially classified information than the January seizure at issue in the letter. CBS News has learned that investigators continue to catalog his documents together with a"filter team" to see if anything should be returned to Trump.
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