Federal prosecutors have reportedly started a grand jury investigation into former President ’s handling of classified White House documents he took to his Florida home.
The grand jury has issued a subpoena to the National Archives and Records Administration in order to retrieve boxes of the documents, two people with knowledge on the matter told on Thursday.
Investigators have also requested interviews with Trump administration White House employees, one of the sources said.
The developments suggest that the Department of Justice is looking into how Trump and other members of his administration handled the sensitive materials that he had moved to his Mar-a-Lago residence.
Trump took 15 boxes of government records, letters, mementos and gifts to his home, that the National Archives discovered in January and recovered. The records included ‘items marked as classified national security information’, according to the agency.
Federal officials were in the preliminary stages of the probe in April, it was reported.
In recent months, the Justice Department has made various requests to the National Archives for the records and the subpoena is just one of them, the two sources said.
The probe centers on who boxed up the records, whether anyone was aware they were improperly removed from the White House, how they got to Mar-a-Lago and how they were stored there, a source told The Times.
Trump’s spokesman Taylor Budowich told the newspaper: ‘President Trump consistently handled all documents in accordance with applicable law and regulations. Belated attempts to second-guess that clear fact are politically motivated and misguided.’
The report comes a day after President of Trump administration records to the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot.
Biden declined asserting executive privilege over the records, allowing the latest set of 23,000 emails and attachments to be handed to the National Archives. The agency has already provided hundreds of pages of records to the panel.
.
For more stories like this, .
