The United States Department of Justice has said that it has received evidence that there has probably been an attempt to prevent the investigation of classified documents at former President Donald Trump’s mansion.
The US Department of Justice has found more evidence that classified documents were taken from the White House with the intention of hiding them.
According to the Justice Department, Trump’s lawyer barred FBI agents from looking in the storage room’s drawers during the June search.
The evidence now collected indicates that the secret documents were likely hidden and removed from the storage room. Doing so was probably an attempt to prevent investigations, according to the 54-page document submitted to the court.
According to the Justice Department, Trump’s lawyers told them in June that all documents from the White House were stored in only one place, a storage room at Mar-a-Lago, and that all the boxes had been searched. However, the FBI’s searches in August had found three classified documents on the table.
Documents submitted to the court by the US Department of Justice on Tuesday night also included a photograph. It shows a document whose pages are marked Top Secret.
In the picture, the document is lying on the carpet at Mar-a-Lago with the cover of Time Magazine next to it.
The home search by the federal police, the FBI, was partly based on suspicions of the illegal storage of sensitive defense documents. Any illegal retention of these documents violates US espionage laws.
The judge is still weighing Trump’s request
The Justice Department documents will be discussed Thursday at a court hearing in West Palm Beach. Before that, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon is weighing Donald Trump’s own request to appoint an independent counsel to the investigations.
Cannon said last Saturday that it was his intention to present such a person, but he also gave the Justice Department a chance to respond.
Trump has wanted the processing of the seized materials to be suspended so that an independent lawyer can review the documents.
An outside lawyer with the title of special master is most often appointed to criminal proceedings where it is suspected that some of the evidence may be protected so that it cannot be used in court.
The documents were seized from the Florida residence in Mar-a-Lago on August 8 and many of them are classified as secret.
In Trump’s original request to the court, his lawyer argued that the former president only wanted to protect the parties affected by the classified documents. But legal experts questioned that claim.
Among the documents seized by the FBI were those of Trump’s loyal ally by Roger Stone amnesty decision.
In February 2020, Stone was sentenced to three years and four months in prison for lying to a US House of Representatives committee investigating Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.