The Justice Department has instructed the National Archives not to share with the House Oversight Committee, which is conducting its own investigation, details about the material taken from the White House by Trump, the committee disclosed Thursday, in a hint that a criminal investigation might be underway.
In cases of this type, the FBI would typically look at an array of scenarios, including whether the classified material was mishandled or inadvertently disclosed, and it could examine whether a foreign adversary might have gotten access.
The investigation could put Trump at odds with the FBI yet again.
In July 2016, the FBI opened a highly sensitive investigation into whether any of Trump's associates conspired with the Russians during the presidential campaign. The FBI and prosecutors would later investigate Trump for obstruction after he fired James Comey, then the FBI director, in May 2017.
A decision to open such a sensitive investigation would have required approval from senior FBI officials at headquarters. Typically, opening such a high-profile case would include discussions with top Justice Department leaders, including the National Security Division.
Before proceeding with an investigation, the FBI almost certainly would want an official determination from any agency involved that information was properly classified.
What role Trump played in taking the material from the White House, if any, is not publicly known. It is not likely that he would be a target of the investigation himself at the moment. In the Hillary Clinton investigation involving the emailing of classified information using a private server, the FBI did not target anyone individually.
As part of any investigation, the FBI would want to find out why the classified material was in Trump's possession and who had access to it. Then agents would want to determine who packed the boxes and transported them to Florida and the circumstances surrounding that episode.
Assessing Trump's role could be complex, in part because, as president, Trump had the ability to easily declassify whatever information he wanted.
Trump made attacking Clinton's mishandling of national security materials a centrepiece of his 2016 campaign. The latest revelations about Trump's own laxity with classified information and his haphazard adherence to federal record-keeping laws have spurred Democrats to accuse him of rank hypocrisy.
The House Oversight Committee is investigating Trump's possible violations of the Presidential Records Act and other federal statutes. The panel has been seeking information about the contents of the boxes and looking into reports that Trump "had torn up, destroyed, mutilated or attempted to tear up, destroy or mutilate" documents while in office.
The committee is also investigating reports of "White House employees or contractors finding paper in a toilet in the White House, including the White House residence."
The Justice Department's refusal to fully cooperate with House investigators prompted an angry letter Thursday from Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, D-N.Y., chair of the Oversight Committee, who accused Attorney General Merrick Garland's agency of "obstructing" the panel's work.
The National Archives informed the committee March 28 that it was withholding information about the contents of the boxes found at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate and any information about any reviews conducted by other federal agencies, Maloney said in her letter.
"Based on our consultation with the Department of Justice, we are unable to provide any comment," the archives told the committee.
"By blocking NARA from producing the documents requested by the committee, the department is obstructing the committee's investigation," Maloney wrote Thursday to Garland, referring to the National Archives and Records Administration. "The committee does not wish to interfere in any manner with any potential or ongoing investigation by the Department of Justice. However, the committee has not received any explanation as to why the department is preventing NARA from providing information to the committee that relates to compliance" with the Presidential Records Act, "including unclassified information describing the contents of the 15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago."
A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment.
Trump's penchant for tearing up presidential records was revealed in a 2018 Politico article, but in the past few weeks, a series of disclosures has raised new questions about the Trump administration's failure to follow federal record-keeping laws and its handling of classified information as Trump left office.
A book scheduled to be released in October by a New York Times reporter revealed how staff members in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet, leading them to believe that Trump had tried to flush them.
In a recent statement, Trump said the boxed material had been turned over to the archives as part of "an ordinary and routine process" and suggested that efforts by Democrats to raise questions about his handling of the documents were a scam.
"The fake news is making it seem like me, as the president of the United States, was working in a filing room," he said.
The clash with Garland is the latest example of congressional Democrats' growing frustration with the Justice Department. Last week, members of the committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol urged the attorney general to move more quickly to charge Trump's final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, with contempt of Congress.
One member of the panel, Representative Elaine Luria, D-Va., told him, "Do your job so we can do ours."
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Luke Broadwater and Adam Goldman
Photographs by: Brittany Greeson
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