WASHINGTON – Three months before FBI agents descended on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, federal officials were privately outlining the urgency of a Justice Department investigation into the former president’s handling of classified documents to Trump’s attorneys, according to a May letter from the National Archives and Records Administration.
In a communication, first disclosed by the conservative media outlet Just the News, the acting archivist summarily rejected Trump’s efforts to shield documents from scrutiny and notified attorneys that FBI agents would begin reviewing an initial cache of highly-sensitive materials recovered from Trump’s Florida property in January.
Just the News’ editor John Solomon is one of two people Trump designated on June 19 as his representatives for access to administration records.
The National Archives posted a copy of the letter on its website later Tuesday.
“There are important national security interests in the FBI and others in the Intelligence Community getting access to these materials,” Debra Steidel Wall wrote in the May 10 letter to Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran, adding that more than 100 classified documents were recovered in the initial 15 boxes of documents transferred to the National Archives from Mar-a-Lago.
The classified documents, Wall wrote, represented more than 700 pages, adding that the papers were marked as “classified national security information, up to the level of Top Secret and including Sensitive Compartmented…
