The National Archives and Records Administration notified lawmakers that several electronic communications from Trump White House staffers are still missing, nearly two years since the administration was asked to turn over they.
The nation’s record-keeping agency, in a letter Friday to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, said that despite staff’s unrelenting efforts, electronic communications between several An unspecified White House official remains unincarcerated.
“While there is no easy way to establish absolute accountability, we know that we do not have the power to oversee everything that we should,” said Debra Steidel Wall, the power archivist of the company. United States, wrote in a letter to Oversight President Carolyn Maloney, DN.Y.
The letter goes on to state that the National Archives will be consulting with the Department of Justice on how to resume and recover “illegitimately deleted records.”
It is widely reported that officials in President Donald Trump’s White House have used unofficial electronic messaging accounts during his four years in office. The Presidential Records Act, which says those records are government property and must be preserved, requires employees to copy or forward those messages to their official electronic messaging accounts.
The agency said that although it was able to obtain these files from some of the former officials, some still exist. The Justice Department has been pursuing records from a former Trump official, Peter Navarro, who is accused by prosecutors of using at least one “unofficial” email account – a ProtonMail account – to send and receive emails within while he was serving as president. adviser.
The August legal action comes just weeks after Navarro was criminally indicted after refusing to cooperate with the congressional investigation into the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. year 2021.
The House committee has authority over the Presidential Records Act, a 1978 law requiring the preservation of White House documents as property of the United States government. The request is the latest development in a month of back and forth between the agency and the committee that is investigating the handling of Trump’s records.
Friday’s letter also comes nearly two months after the FBI recovered more than 100 classified documents and more than 10,000 other government documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Trump’s attorneys have provided a sworn certification that all government records have been returned.
Maloney and other Democratic lawmakers on the panel sought a summary from the National Archives, but have not yet received notice because the Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into the matter.
