The woman behind the ransacking of Mar-a-Largo was actually honored by former President Trump while he was in office. Acting Archivist Debra Steidel Wall initially notified Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran that she was referring information to the FBI to investigate whether 15 boxes of materials “were handled in an unlawful manner.”
From the Washington Post:
Acting Archivist Debra Steidel Wall also notified Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran that the agency would provide the FBI access to 15 boxes of materials in order to investigate “whether those records were handled in an unlawful manner” and conduct an assessment to determine if any damage might have resulted from the improper handling of materials, according to the May 10 letter.
[…]
“As the Department of Justice’s National Security Division explained to you on April 29, 2022: ‘There are important national security interests in the FBI and others in the Intelligence Community getting access to these materials. According to NARA, among the materials in the boxes are over 100 documents with classification markings, comprising more than 700 pages. Some include the highest levels of classification, including Special Access Program (SAP) materials,’” Steidel Wall wrote.
The FBI removed an additional 20 boxes of items from the Mar-a-Lago Club earlier this month, including four sets of top-secret documents and seven other sets of classified information, according to a written inventory of the items seized in the high-profile search of Mar-a-Lago earlier this month.
[…]
Trump’s lawyers sent letters on April 29 and May 1, according to Steidel Wall’s account, to delay the production of the materials to the FBI so that Trump could decide whether to assert executive privilege over the materials. John Solomon, a writer who also serves as one of Trump’s representatives to the National Archives, first posted the text of the letter on Monday.
Steidel Wall ultimately rebuffed their request after consulting with the Department of Justice.
“The question in this case is not a close one,” Steidel Wall wrote. “The Executive Branch here is seeking access to records belonging to, and in the custody of, the Federal Government itself, not only in order to investigate whether those records were handled in an unlawful manner but also, as the National Security Division explained, to ‘conduct an assessment of the potential damage resulting from the apparent manner in which these materials were stored and transported and take any necessary remedial steps.’”
Trump’s ultimately a victim of his own failure to drain the swamp https://t.co/sSLC98Pcnf
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 23, 2022
The entire investigation is a ruse, Trump can declassify anything he wants, and he still holds his security clearance (which will be the next thing they try to take). The overreach by the Biden administration is so bad that the judge who authorized the search is starting to flip on them.
