A trove of unsealed documents connected with the investigation into allegations that former President Donald Trump mishandled classified materials has revealed that several top Biden administration officials were working with the National Archives to help bring Special Counsel Jack Smith's case against him.
Lawyers representing Trump in the Florida case compiled court exhibits consisting of more than 300 pages of unredacted items, including emails and other correspondence showing that Deputy White House Counsel Jonathan Su had been regularly communicating with National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) National Archive officials, as had the Department of Justice, reports Real Clear Investigations' Julie Kelly.
The correspondence also indicates that the Department of Justice had been communicating with NARA throughout most of 2021, even though it had claimed it became involved only after the Archives had sent in a criminal referral on Feb. 9, 2022.
The referral was based on the Archives reporting that records with "classified markings" were included among the 15 boxes of materials Trump had turned in.
President Joe Biden, who denied involvement in the investigation, was not specifically named in the exhibits, which Trump's attorneys filed in January.
The items were at first heavily redacted, but the team asked U.S. District Court judge Aileen Cannon, the judge presiding over the case to remove many of the redactions.
Meanwhile, Smith claimed that releasing the materials would jeopardize his investigation, reveal potential witnesses, and potentially subject them to risks of harassment and intimidation.
Cannon, however, posted the mostly unredacted archives on April 22, and a comparison of the redacted and the unredacted materials showed the coordination between NARA and the DOJ, the White House, and the intelligence community.
The documents revealed that shortly after Trump left office in 2021, Biden's Office of Records Management and the National Archives started making demands to the former president's transition team and Mark Meadows, his chief of staff.
Archives general counsel Gary Stern emailed Trump's team in May 2021, the unredacted documents show, and asked the attorneys to account for almost 2 dozen original presidential records that were not transferred.
He did not specify any particular records except for “original correspondence between President Trump and North Korean Leader Kim Jung-un” and “the letter that President Obama left for President Trump on his first day in office."
One of the unsealed FBI reports indicated the Archives also wanted to get hold of a map that Trump had drawn on with a Sharpie during a 2018 briefing on the track of Hurricane Dorian.
David Ferriero, a national archivist appointed by Barack Obama in 2009, warned the Trump transition team in June 2021 that he was "running out of patience, and on Aug. 30 told Trump's team that he assumed the boxes were destroyed and he would have to report the loss to lawmakers, the DOJ, and the White House.
Other documents showed evidence that White House lawyers were advising the archives, including a draft letter accompanying a Sept. 1, 2021 email where Stern said he had advised White House counsel about the documents.
The letter, from Ferriero to Attorney General Merrick Garland, said that presidential records "may have been unlawfully removed from U.S. government custody or possibly destroyed."