Trump team may have moved classified papers amid probe, US Justice Department says
- White House records held at Donald Trump’s Florida home may have been concealed or removed before FBI search
- That would suggest possible attempts to obstruct the investigation, the US Department of Justice said
The US Justice Department said it had evidence that classified documents were deliberately concealed from the FBI when it tried to retrieve them in June from former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate, prompting its unprecedented search of his home.
In a 54-page filing, prosecutors on Tuesday laid out their evidence of obstruction of justice, alleging publicly for the first time that Trump aides both falsely certified in June that the former president had returned all the government records he had stored in his home after leaving the White House in January 2021.
It also revealed that Trump lawyers “explicitly prohibited government personnel from opening or looking inside any of the boxes” inside a storage room when FBI agents first travelled to his Palm Beach Mar-a-Lago resort in June to retrieve the records.
“The government also developed evidence that government records were likely concealed and removed from the Storage Room and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation,” the department said in a filing in US District Court in the Southern District of Florida.
It released a photograph of some of the records found inside Trump’s home bearing classification markings, some of which refer to clandestine human sources.
The Justice Department’s filings come ahead of a Thursday court hearing before US District Judge Aileen Cannon in West Palm Beach. She is weighing Trump’s request to appoint a special master who would conduct a privilege review of the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago on August 8, many of which are labelled as classified.