The Justice Department said Tuesday it had uncovered efforts to obstruct its investigation into the discovery of classified documents at former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate, saying “government records were likely concealed and removed” from a storage room at the property.
The assertion was made in a court filing Tuesday night that lays out the most detailed chronology to date of interactions between Justice Department officials and Trump representatives over the presence of the documents at Mar-a-Lago.
The department says Trump’s lawyers told them in June that all the records that had come from the White House were stored in one location — a Mar-a-Lago storage room — and that “there were no other records stored in any private office space or other location at the Premises and that all available boxes were searched.”
In their search earlier this month, however, agents found classified documents both in the storage room as well as in the former president’s office — including three classified documents found not in boxes, but in office desks.
The filing responds to a request from the Trump legal team for a special master to review the documents seized during the Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon is set to hear arguments on the matter.
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