Justice believes Trump keeping more documents

NEW YORK >> A top Justice Department official told former President Donald Trump’s lawyers in recent weeks that the department believed he had not returned all the documents he took when he left the White House, according to two people briefed on the matter.

The outreach from the official, Jay Bratt, who leads the department’s counterintelligence operations, is the most concrete indication yet that investigators remain skeptical that Trump has been fully cooperative in their efforts to recover documents that the former president was supposed to have turned over to the National Archives at the end of his term.

It is not clear what steps the Justice Department might take to retrieve any material it thinks Trump still holds.

And it is not known whether the Justice Department has gathered new evidence that Trump has held onto government material even after the court-authorized search in August of Mar-a-lago, his private club and residence in Florida, and 18 months of previous efforts by the federal government to persuade the former president to return what he had taken on leaving office.

The outreach from the department prompted a rift among Trump’s lawyers about how to respond, with one camp counseling a cooperative approach that would include bringing in an outside firm to conduct a further search for documents and another advising Trump to maintain a more combative posture.

The more combative camp, the people briefed on the matter said, won out.

The government has found more than 300 classified documents in material that had been kept at Mar-a-lago, including some marked as containing the most sensitive information that would cross the president’s desk.

But the Justice Department has previously signaled doubts that Trump had turned over everything in his possession. Shortly after the search in August, it was revealed that federal investigators had found dozens of empty folders at Mar-a-lago marked as containing classified information. The disclosure raised further questions about whether the Justice Department had indeed recovered all the classified materials that may have been taken out of the White House.

The empty folders were found during the search of Mar-a-lago along with 40 other empty folders that said they contained sensitive documents that should be returned “to staff secretary/military aide,” according to a court filing. Agents found the empty folders along with seven documents marked as “top secret” in Trump’s office. Investigators also found 11 more marked as “top secret” in a storage room.

The department has also signaled in court filings that it has continued to try to determine whether more government materials remain unaccounted for.