TIMELINE: The federal criminal investigation into former President Donald Trump's potential mishandling of classified documents ramped up this week in significant and unprecedented fashion.
Fourteen of the 15 boxes recovered from former President Donald Trump's Florida estate early this year contained classified documents, many of them top secret.
The federal criminal investigation into former President Donald Trump's potential mishandling of classified documents ramped up this week in significant and unprecedented fashion, with the FBI executing a search warrant at Trump's home at his Mar-a-Lago resort. The Justice Department inquiry is about documents that Trump removed from the White House as his term was ending in January 2021. Earlier this year, officials from the National Archives and Records Administration, known as NARA, recovered 15 boxes of presidential documents from Mar-a-Lago.
Trump's lawyers previously worked with NARA to voluntarily turn over some documents, but the Mar-a-Lago search clearly indicates a new phase of the probe. Trump has denied all wrongdoing and claims the investigation is a politically motivated sham, intended to derail his potential bid to return to the White House.An official from NARA contacts Trump's team after realizing that several important documents weren't handed over before Trump left the White House.
News outlets, including CNN, report that NARA asked the Justice Department to investigate Trump's handling of White House records and whether he violated the Presidential Records Act and other laws related to classified information. The Presidential Records Act requires all records created by a sitting president to be turned over to the National Archives at the end of their administration.