Trump took classified material from White House to Florida: US National Archives

The US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has confirmed that former president Donald Trump stored classified documents at his Florida villa after he left office.

NARA staff found classified records "marked as classified national security information" within boxes at Mar-a-Lago, according to a letter from Archivist David Ferriero to the House Oversight Committee posted on the National Archives and Record Administration’s website on Friday.

Possible classified material found in Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort: Report

The possible classified material was discovered among more than a dozen boxes of presidential records from Trump

Ferriero said in his letter that NARA had discussed the matter with the US Department of Justice and Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, D-N.Y., chair of the House Oversight Committee, who has been scrutinizing how Trump handled presidential records.

It is yet unclear how the Justice Department will raise the matter with Trump who faces three civil lawsuits seeking to hold him accountable for his role in the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill while investigators are examining his company, the Trump Organization, for evidence of fraud.

Ferriero made clear in his letter that NARA staff had been concerned for several years about Trump’s failure to follow the record-keeping law.

The latest revelations by Ferriero about Trump’s laxity with classified information and his haphazard adherence to federal record-keeping laws triggered outrage among  Democrats who remembered that during Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, a main feature of his speeches were the attacks on his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton over her mishandling of national security material.

The Justice Department could open a criminal investigation into whether Trump and his aides mishandled classified information, as it did in Clinton’s case.

Ferriero added in his Friday letter that textual presidential records had been regularly torn up by Trump and that the White House staff had made efforts to tape some of them back together.

"Although White House staff during the Trump administration recovered and taped together some of the torn-up records, a number of other torn-up records that were transferred had not been reconstructed by the White House,” he wrote.

The National Archives added in its letter the Trump White House staff including Trump's senior adviser Peter Navarro and other advisers and the White House staff members and aides among others, including Andrew Giuliani, Chad Gilmartin, Ivanka Trump, Kayleigh McEnany, Kellyanne Conway, and Mark Meadows, who was Trump’s former chief of staff, had failed to turn over material that included “certain social media records.”

It said Snapchat records sent by the Trump White House staff for presidential business had not been handed over to archives.

Also, a book written by a Times reporter and scheduled to be released in October reveals how the White House staff periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet, leading them to believe that Trump had tried to flush them.

Trump also used cellphones to conduct his official presidential tasks, which could have created large gaps in the official White House logs of his telephone calls.

In a statement released on Friday night, Trump, who had the power as President to declassify any material, said the boxes had been turned over to NARA as part of “an ordinary and routine process” and claimed that Democrats efforts to raise questions about him and his presidential staff's mishandling of documents was a politically-motivated scam. “The fake news is making it seem like me, as the president of the United States, was working in a filing room,” Trump claimed.

NARA confirmed fifteen boxes of “classified national security information”, which were subject to the Presidential Records Act and must be turned over to the archives, had been taken by Trump from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago villa residence after his term had ended.

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