A group of prosecutors within the Department of Justice (DOJ) believe there is enough evidence to charge former President Donald Trump with a crime relating to his improper removal of government documents from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago home, following his departure from office.
According to Bloomberg, which cites unnamed sources with knowledge of the matter, DOJ prosecutors believe Trump could be charged, at minimum, with obstruction.
The prosecutors have not yet made any formal recommendation to Attorney General Merrick Garland, who has the final say in whether to charge Trump. The sources also told the publication that it’s also unlikely that the former president would be solely charged with obstruction.
The sources also said that charges, if they are to come about, won’t be filed before the midterms, and will likely come after the Christmas holiday.
According to a partially released affidavit from the Mar-a-Lago search warrant, the FBI said that it had “cause to believe that evidence of obstruction would be found at” the former president’s resort. It’s highly likely that that claim is related to a subpoena that was issued to Trump this past spring, where he was ordered to return all classified documents taken from the White House and to affirm, through his legal counsel, that he had none remaining on the premises.
Earlier this month, it was revealed that Trump had ordered someone to move documents — including some marked classified — from a storage locker at Mar-a-Lago to his private residence, both before and after the DOJ came to the property to execute their subpoena order. That action could constitute an act of obstruction, as it demonstrates Trump trying to hide documents and disobey a direct subpoena order telling him to turn over all classified documents.
In addition to obstruction, the affidavit indicated that the DOJ was also looking into the possibility of Espionage Act violations by Trump. That law, though historically used to prosecute government whistleblowers and antiwar activists, is concerned with the handling of government documents in a way, whether purposeful or unintentionally, that harms or could harm national security.
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has tried since the beginning of 2021 — when Trump left the presidency — to recover government documents it knew he had been keeping in the residence wing of the White House while he was in office. After nearly a full year of refusing to hand those documents back, the former president finally relented, agreeing to let the agency recover them in January 2022 (but only after they had threatened to involve Congress in the matter).
When NARA found classified materials among the documents, they alerted the DOJ, which led to the spring subpoena order. After evidence surfaced that the former president indeed had more classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, even after he denied it, the FBI searched the estate in August.
More than 11,000 documents have been recovered altogether, including more than 300 documents that had classified markings on them. NARA has stated that it is still missing some material it believes Trump had in his possession at the start of 2021.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment. We are presently looking for 242 new monthly donors in the next 2 days.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy