WASHINGTON — The National Archives and Records Administration said that it hasn’t recovered all the presidential records that were supposed to be turned over at the end of the Trump administration.
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Some White House staff had conducted official business using accounts that weren’t forwarded to their official electronic accounts, the National Archives said in a Sept. 30 letter to House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat.
“While there is no easy way to establish absolute accountability, we do know that we do not have custody of everything we should,” acting Archivist of the United States Debra Steidel Wall wrote.
The National Archives’ efforts to obtain records after the chaotic last days of the Trump administration — both presidential records from everyday business and classified material — have been in the spotlight since the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Aug. 8 search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. The archives obtained one box of papers from Mr. Trump in January; others were handed over in June before the FBI seized another tranche of material in August.
The archives had told Maloney in February that some electronic records from former Trump White House officials were missing. In the new letter, the archivist wrote, “NARA has been able to obtain such records from a number of former officials and will continue to pursue the return of similar types of Presidential records from former officials.”
An expanded version of this report appears at WSJ.com.
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