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Former US President Donald Trump’s team may not have returned all the classified records removed from the White House at the end of his presidency even after an FBI search of his home, US prosecutors warned on Thursday, calling it a potential national security risk that needs investigation.
That revelation came in a Justice Department court filing asking US District Judge Aileen Cannon to let it continue reviewing about 100 classified records seized by the FBI at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate while it investigates whether classified documents were illegally removed from the White House and improperly stored there.
Trump is under investigation for retaining government records, some of which were marked as highly classified, at the resort in Palm Beach, Florida, his home after leaving office in January 2021.
The 100 documents represent a fraction of the more than 11,000 records and photographs seized, most of which the government said Trump may review because they are not classified.
“This motion is limited to … the seized classified records because those aspects of the order will cause the most immediate and serious harms to the government and the public,” the department said in its court filing.
The prosecutors also asked the judge not to allow an independent arbiter, called a “special master,” to review classified materials seized from Trump’s property.
Trump, in a posting on his Truth Social platform, described the request as a waste of money.
The Justice Department on Thursday suggested there could be more classified records that were removed from the Trump White House that investigators have not yet located. This revelation comes about a week after the Justice Department released a detailed list of property seized from Trump’s home which showed the FBI located 48 empty folders labeled as classified and another 42 which indicated they should be returned to a staff secretary or military aide.
Legal experts were perplexed as to why the folders were empty, and it was not clear whether records were missing.
“Without a stay, the government and the public will also suffer irreparable harm from the undue delay to the criminal investigation,” prosecutors wrote.
“The injunction against using classified records in the criminal investigation could impede efforts to identify the existence of any additional classified records that are not being properly stored – which itself presents the potential for ongoing risk to national security,” they added.
