In Trump’s case, the National Archives tried for more than a year after Trump left office, without success, to retrieve all the records they held. When Trump finally returned the 15 boxes of documents in January 2022, archives officials found they contained classified material.
After the case was referred to the Justice Department, Trump’s lawyers handed over more material from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and said there were no more documents at the compound.
That turned out to be a lie. Ultimately, the FBI recovered an additional 13,000 documents from the estate, approximately 100 of which were marked classified.
House Democrats introduced the “Mar-a-Lago Act” in 2017, which would require Trump to regularly disclose visitors to his Florida home, but it was never voted on by the chamber or the full Congress.
Democratic Representative Adam Schiff, the outgoing House Intelligence Committee chairman, said Congress should ask the US intelligence community to assess whether any of the documents from Trump or Biden threaten national security.
“I don’t think we can rule out the possibility without knowing more facts,” Schiff said on ABC’s “This Week.”