About two dozen boxes of presidential records stored in then-president Donald Trump’s White House residence were not returned to the National Archives and Records Administration in the final days of his term even after Archives officials were told by a Trump lawyer that the documents should be returned, according to an email from the top lawyer at the record-keeping agency.
“It is also our understanding that roughly two dozen boxes of original presidential records were kept in the Residence of the White House over the course of President Trump’s last year in office and have not been transferred to NARA, despite a determination by Pat Cipollone in the final days of the administration that they need to be,” wrote Gary Stern, the agency’s chief counsel, in an email to Trump lawyers in May 2021, according to a copy reviewed by The Washington Post.
Cipollone was the former White House counsel designated by Trump as one of his representatives to the Archives. A spokeswoman for Cipollone declined to comment Wednesday.
The previously unreported email — sent about 100 days after the former president left office with the subject line “Need for Assistance re Presidential Records” — shows just how early Archives officials realized that many documents were missing from the Trump White House. It also illustrates the myriad efforts Archives officials made to have the documents returned over an 18-month period, culminating with an FBI raid earlier this month at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.
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