A lawyer for Donald Trump told the National Archives that boxes that the former president took with him when he was leaving the White House only contained “news clippings.”
The Washington Post reported on Friday that Pat Philbin, the former deputy White House counsel, told the National Archives last September that Trump had 12 boxes of news clippings at Mar-a-Lago. Philbin based that assertion on what he was told by Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows.
Philbin also said Meadows told him that no documents had been destroyed.
The National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Mar-a-Lago in January, which included classified documents. The Department of Justice launched an investigation into Trump at the request of the Archives in February. In June Trump’s team turned over more documents.
However, officials at the DOJ suspected that members of Trump’s team were not being truthful about turning over all the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. In August the FBI executed a search warrant at the Florida estate and retrieved more than 100 classified documents, including some marked “top secret.”
