The National Archives said it has uncovered classified national security material among the 15 boxes of records taken by former President Donald Trump when he left office last year.
The boxes of White House documents, recovered by the National Archives earlier this month from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, contained “items marked as classified national security information,” according to a letter posted on the National Archives and Records Administration’s website Friday.
The records also contained “top secret” material, The Washington Post reported. Other records reportedly included what Trump has previously described as “love letters” from North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, and the letter former President Barack Obama left for Trump before leaving office.
The Presidential Records Act requires that the White House preserve and transfer all written communication related to a president’s official duties to the National Archives.
“NARA has also learned that some White House staff conducted official business using non-official electronic messaging accounts that were not copied or forwarded into their official electronic messaging accounts, as required by section 2209 of the PRA,” the letter stated.
More disturbing still, NARA said that records were outright destroyed and sometimes taped back together. A 2018 Politico story first reported that staff taped documents back together after Trump ripped them up. NARA’s letter further confirms that report.
“After the end of the Trump Administration, NARA learned that additional paper records that had been torn up by former President Trump were included in the records transferred to us,” the letter said. “Although White House staff during the Trump Administration recovered and taped together some of the torn-up records, a number of other torn-up records that were transferred had not been reconstructed by the White House.”