Sadie Gurman, Alex Leary
A senior Justice Department official recently told Donald Trump’s legal team that law-enforcement officials don’t believe the former president returned all of the government documents he took with him when he left the White House, people familiar with the matter said.
The communication from Jay Bratt, chief of the Department of Justice’s counterintelligence and export-control section, was the latest indication that the government is still seeking some records it believes Trump should have relinquished at the end of his administration.The National Archives and Records Administration told Congress late last month that it hadn’t recovered all of the presidential records that were supposed to be turned over, adding that there was “no easy way to establish absolute accountability.”
The Justice Department declined to comment on Bratt’s outreach, which was reported earlier by the New York Times. Trump’s spokesman, Taylor Budowich, in a statement didn’t address the substance of the communication between the government and the former president’s lawyers.
It couldn’t be determined what, if anything, law-enforcement officials planned to do to retrieve the missing information, nor was it clear what the Justice Department believes it has yet to recover.
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.
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