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Trump Lawyer Reportedly Acknowledged National Archives Should Get Missing Docs Back

An email from a National Archives attorney noted that Pat Cipollone had determined the records “[needed] to be” given to the agency.

An email from the National Archives’ top attorney indicated that Donald Trump’s counsel had agreed the former president needed to return documents from his time in the White House, The Washington Post reported Wednesday, in the latest example of agency officials’ attempts to retrieve Trump’s presidential records in 2021. “It is also our understanding that roughly two dozen boxes of original presidential records were kept in the Residence of the White House over the course of President Trump’s last year in office,” lawyer Gary Stein wrote in May that year, “and have not been transferred to NARA, despite a determination by [Trump counsel] Pat Cipollone in the final days of the administration that they need to be.” The email, subject-lined “Need for Assistance re Presidential Records,” was not sent to Cipollone, but to Trump lawyer Scott Gast and “two longtime Cipollone deputies,” according to the Post. “We know things are very chaotic, as they always are in the course of a one-term transition,” Stern wrote. “… But it is absolutely necessary that we obtain and account for all presidential records.”