- Trump took boxes of official presidential records to Florida, The Washington Post reports.
- The National Archives had to retrieve the documents from Mar-a-Lago.
- The documents include letters from North Korea's Kim Jong Un and former President Obama.
Former President Donald Trump took several boxes of official White House records and memorabilia that should have been handed over to the National Archives to Mar-a-Lago instead, The Washington Post reports.
The National Archives had to recover the documents from Trump's Florida resort and winter residence, three sources familiar with the matter told The Post. The Trump White House should have given the documents over to the agency upon leaving office under the Presidential Records Act.
The items include correspondence from North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, with whom Trump said he exchanged "beautiful" love letters while in office, and a letter that former President Barack Obama left Trump in 2017, according to The Post.
The Post previously reported that some of the records from the Trump White House that have been turned over to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection had been torn up and taped back together. Politico first reported on Trump's habit of ripping up documents into tiny shreds in 2018, a routine that left staffers in charge of record maintenance to tape them back together.
In addition to tearing up documents in the Trump White House, officials would round up documents in "burn bags" and send them to the Pentagon to be incinerated.
The Archives has turned over at least 700 pages of documents from the Trump White House over to the January 6 Committee, the Post previously reported, including some that had been ripped up or otherwise damaged.
And the agency confirmed in a previous statement to the Post that records in its possession that the agency turned over to the January 6 Committee "included paper records that had been torn up by former President Trump."
"White House records management officials during the Trump Administration recovered and taped together some of the torn-up records," the Archives said. "These were turned over to the National Archives at the end of the Trump Administration, along with a number of torn-up records that had not been reconstructed by the White House."
Both the destruction of White House documents and Trump taking boxes of official documents to Mar-a-Lago with him likely violate the Presidential Records Act, which requires White House officials to maintain and preserve official documents, The Post said.
"It is absolutely a violation of the act," Courtney Chartier, president of the Society of American Archivists, told the Post. "There is no ignorance of these laws. There are White House manuals about the maintenance of these records."
White Houses deal with large quantities of documents, and most recent presidential administrations have run afoul of the Act in some ways, either by staff using personal phone numbers or email accounts to conduct official business, or administrations not properly preserving some documents on the way out, the Post noted.
But the Trump White House ripping up large quantities of documents and Trump taking multiple boxes of important, sensitive documents out of the White House on the way out stands apart as highly unusual — even if typical of Trump.
"I don't think he did this out of malicious intent to avoid complying with the Presidential Records Act," a former Trump official told the Post. "As long as he's been in business, he's been very transactional and it was probably his longtime practice and I don't think his habits changed when he got to the White House."
But there's not much of an enforcement mechanism for the Act, or an easy way to hold former presidents or White House officials accountable for either failing to preserve documents or wrongfully keeping official materials in their possession after leaving office.
"That they didn't follow rules is not a shock," Democratic Rep. Stephanie Murphy, a member of the January 6 Committee, told the Post. "As for how this development relates to the committee's work, we have different sources and methods for obtaining documents and information that we are seeking."
