Trump team handed over items marked as classified: source
- US News
- February 11, 2023
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawyers for former President Donald Trump have voluntarily turned over additional classified papers and a laptop belonging to a Trump assistant to federal investigators in recent months, a person familiar with the situation said Friday night.
The legal team also provided an empty folder of secret tags, according to the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press to discuss an ongoing investigation. It was initially not clear what material should have been in the folder.
A special counsel for the Justice Department has been investigating the safekeeping of hundreds of documents marked as classified at his Florida property, Mar-a-Lago. FBI agents who served a search warrant at the property in August recovered about 100 classified documents, including records classified as top secret.
A federal grand jury has been hearing evidence in the case for months. Prosecutors are investigating whether Trump deliberately hoarded the footage and whether he or someone else tried to obstruct their investigation, court filings show.
ABC News first reported the discovery of the additional documents.
The person familiar with the matter said a search weeks ago at the Mar-a-Lago complex, which was monitored by Trump’s legal department, found a handful of pages with classified markings and promptly turned them over to the Justice Department. The documents were found in a box containing thousands of pages, the person said. The Trump legal team had assigned investigators to look for other classified documents that had not yet been seized by the government.
Separately, the FBI on Friday searched the Indiana home of former Vice President Mike Pence and found an additional document with secret markings after his attorneys discovered sensitive documents last month. FBI officials have also searched President Joe Biden’s Delaware homes after his attorneys found documents with classified markings at his former Washington office and on his Wilmington property.
