Former President Donald Trump took classifed information to his Florida home from the White House, the US National Archives and Records Administration said. About15 boxes of records were stored in the Republican leader’s Mar-a-Lago residence, NARA confirmed, further adding that the matter has been sent to the Justice Department.
In a letter to the Congress on Friday, David Ferriero, the archivist of the United States revealed that the agency ‘has identified items marked as classified national security information within the boxes’.
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The letter was written to US Representative Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat, chair of the House of Representatives oversight committee. It follows numerous reports around Trump’s handling of sensitive and even classified information during his time as president and after he left the White House.
Federal law bars the removal of classified documents to unauthorised locations, though it is possible that Trump could try to argue that, as president, he was the ultimate declassification authority.
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“These new revelations deepen my concern about former President Trump’s flagrant disregard for federal records laws and the potential impact on our historical record,” Maloney said in a statement.
Trump recently denied reports about his administration’s tenuous relationship with the National Archives and his lawyers said that “they are continuing to search for additional presidential records that belong to the National Archives.”
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In a statement Friday night, Trump said, “The National Archives did not ‘find’ anything, they were given, upon request, Presidential Records in an ordinary and routine process.”
“If this was anyone but ‘Trump,’ there would be no story here,” he said.
With inputs from the Associated Press