Donald Trump left the White House with boxes of official documents, including letters from Kim Jong-un and Obama, according to a report.
According to a report published Monday by The Washington Post, the US National Archives agency recovered last month from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida “multiple boxes” of documents that should have been been turned over to this agency upon leaving office.
The boxes contained important communication records, gifts and letters from world leaders, including correspondence from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, with whom the former US president said he exchanged “very beautiful” love letters while in office, and a letter that former President Barack Obama left Trump in 2017, according to the US newspaper, which cites three sources familiar with the matter.
The report has explained that the recovered documents were incorrectly stored in the former president’s house.
Although all recent administrations have violated the Presidential Records Act in some way, a source has told the newspaper that the transfer to Mar-a-Lago was “out of the ordinary” as it is an unprecedented case for the volume of information extracted from the White House.
“Archivos Nacionales has never had such a volume of transfer as in that case,” the source said.
Discussions between Trump’s lawyers and the US agency began last year and culminated in the transfer of the documents in January. The National Archives has not made a statement despite being asked for comment by the media.
The US agency has had to deal with a president who failed to comply with document retention requirements and frequently tore them up, leaving hundreds of pages glued back together and others arriving at the agency in pieces.
The Washington Post previously reported that some of the Trump-era White House records that were turned over to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on Capitol Hill had been torn up and glued back together.
According to official sources, the former US president routinely tore up documents and threw them away after reading them. In addition, the officials gathered the documents in “burn bags” and sent them to the US Department of Defense (the Pentagon) to be incinerated.
Both the destruction of White House documents and Trump taking boxes of official documents home with him could be considered violations of the Presidential Records Act, which requires White House officials to maintain and preserve documents. officials to transfer them to the next president of the country, the newspaper has highlighted.
