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Justice Dept. Officials Think Donald Trump May Have More Docs: NYT

A senior department official has reportedly reached out to the former president’s legal team to indicate he doesn’t believe all relevant materials have been returned.

A top official at the Department of Justice communicated to Donald Trump’s attorneys that they don’t believe the former president has returned all the government records he held onto after leaving office, two sources told The New York Times on Thursday. It is unclear what action, if any, the department plans to take around further document retrieval following the outreach from senior official Jay Bratt, chief of the department’s counterintelligence and export-control section. It was also unclear what the department believes it has yet to recover after the Aug. 8 seizure of roughly 11,000 documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. The Times reported that Bratt’s outreach sowed discord among Trump’s team, with some of his attorneys set on cooperating and others intent on resisting. The latter camp won the day, the Times reported. “The weaponized Department of Justice and the politicized FBI are spending millions and millions of American tax dollars to perpetuate witch hunt after witch hunt,” a Trump spokesperson told the newspaper.