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All presidential records held by the former administration of President Donald Trump have not been turned over, and the National Archives has informed Congress that it will discuss its options for doing so with the Justice Department.
On September 13, a congressional panel requested an expedited examination of the Trump administration’s presidential records from the National Archives and Records Administration after staffers at the agency said they were unsure of the status of all records.
In a letter sent to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Friday, acting Archivist Debra Wall stated, “We do not have custody of everything we should, even if there is no simple method to guarantee absolute accountability.
The Presidential Records Act was violated, according to the Archives, when certain White House employees used personal email accounts to do official business and did not copy or forward those messages to their official accounts, Wall said.
“NARA has been successful in obtaining such data from a number of former officials and will continue to pursue the return of similar sorts of presidential records from former officials,” Wall wrote in the letter, which was originally published by the Wall Street Journal.
The Department of Justice would be consulted on “whether to file an action for the recovery of records unlawfully deleted,” the federal department in responsible of maintaining government records, according to the spokesperson.
Although it provided Reuters with a copy of the letter, the Oversight Committee has not yet released a statement about it.
Trump’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Justice Department is looking into whether Trump committed a crime by keeping government documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after leaving office in January 2021, including some that were classified as “top secret.”
During a Mar-a-Lago search that was authorised by the court on August 8th, the FBI recovered more than 11,000 data, including around 100 documents tagged as classified.
Over how the records are handled, the Justice Department and Trump’s attorneys are engaged in a legal dispute. Despite having access to the secret materials, government attorneys requested on Friday that the appeals court expedite their ability to access the non-classified documents that were confiscated in Florida.
