DOJ investigators believe Trump may have even more government documents: report

07 October 2022

Twenty months after leaving the White House, former President Donald Trump continues to be the subject of a variety of investigations — including the U.S. Department of Justice’s probe of government documents he was storing at his Mar-a-Lago compound in Palm Beach, Florida. FBI agents confiscated boxes of documents when they executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, August 8. And according to New York Times sources, Trump may still have some government documents that federal investigators haven’t obtained.

Reporting for the Times in an article published on October 6, journalists Michael S. Schmidt, Maggie Haberman and Katie Benner explain, “A top Justice Department official told former President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers in recent weeks that the Department believed he had not returned all the documents he took when he left the White House, according to two people briefed on the matter. The outreach from the official, Jay I. Bratt, who leads the Department’s counterintelligence operations, is the most concrete indication yet that investigators remain skeptical that Mr. Trump has been fully cooperative in their efforts to recover documents the former president was supposed to have turned over to the National Archives at the end of his term.”

It is unclear, the Times journalists report, “what steps” DOJ “might take to retrieve any material it thinks Mr. Trump still holds.”

According to Schmidt, Haberman and Benner, “The outreach from the Department prompted a rift among Mr. Trump’s lawyers about how to respond, with one camp counseling a cooperative approach that would include bringing in an outside firm to conduct a further search for documents and another advising Mr. Trump to maintain a more combative posture.”

Christopher M. Kise, the reporters note, is among the Trump lawyers who has urged Trump to be cooperative with DOJ investigators. Kise, they report, has “suggested hiring a forensic firm to search for additional documents.” But other Trump attorneys, according to Schmidt, Haberman and Benner, “have argued for taking a more adversarial posture in dealing with the Justice Department” and have “disagreed with Mr. Kise’s approach.”

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