In May 2021, four months after the end of his presidency, the National Archives and Records Administration asked him to return materials that Trump had hauled to Mar-a-Lago, but which are owned by the public and administered by the US Government.
Only in February 2022, after nine months of unsuccessful negotiation [sic] with Trump’s people, did NARA refer to DOJ his refusal to return the materials.
In June 2022, concern over classified materials caused DOJ’s National Security Division to send the chief of its Counterintelligence and Export Control Section to Mar-a-Lago. The result of an apparently friendly chat was a banal FBI request for Trump to put a lock on door where the materials were kept.
After the FBI — apparently not deterred by the lock — executed a warrant at Mar-a-Lago on August 8, there is speculation about classified materials recovered by the FBI. For example, do they include a transcript of the “perfect phone call” with Zelensky, notes on meetings with Putin, or information on the Saudis’ Khashoggi assassination?
Assuming classified materials at Mar-a-Lago were the DOJ’s motive to get a warrant, what took so long? For 15 months, the US Government let Trump refuse to return property that doesn’t belong to him, and with which he absconded in January 2021. Trump never denied having the materials. Nor did he explain why he refused to return them. Yet authorities continued for more than a year to be supplicants.
Imagine a citizen in similar circumstances who is not a former president. It is inconceivable that authorities would send a polite request rather than promptly appear and recover government materials, let alone negotiate the issue for months. Even more so if the materials were merely suspected of including classified stuff.
It’s not is if the law is complicated. Title 18, Section 2701 (Presidential Records Act) prescribes a fine or imprisonment for “[w]however … carries away any record … of the United States … deposited … in any public office”. Granted, the first step wouldn’t be an indictment. But after Trump blew off NARA’s first request in May 2021 to return the materials, why did NARA not immediately refer the matter to DOJ? What was there to negotiate, especially in light of Trump’s well-document history of thumbing his nose at basic legal processes?
As for classified materials, what was DOJ’s National Security Division doing all that time? If materials are classified for a reason, and if there is a concern about the legitimacy of a person’s having them, or about how the materials are stored, institutional lethargy hardly is the right response.
Further, if the classified materials are of such high value as speculated, a door lock was the best that the nation’s chief of Counterintelligence and Export Control could come up with as a way to mitigate concerns about unauthorized access to those materials? Either the materials are not vital to national security (in which case they should declassified), or this is yet another instance where neither the facts nor the law, but merely a person’s status as former office holder, determine how US authorities do what they do.
