Trump team may have moved classified papers amid probe: Justice Dept.
The US government says it is in possession of evidence showing that former president Donald Trump's team tried to obstruct a probe into the discovery of classified documents at the former president's residence.
The Justice Department says said it had evidence that classified documents were deliberately
concealed from the FBI when it tried to retrieve them in June from Trump's Florida estate, prompting an unprecedented search of his home.
Prosecutors laid out their evidence of obstruction of justice, saying that Trump aides both falsely certified in June that the former president had returned all the government records he had stored in his home after leaving the White House in January 2021.
It also revealed that Trump lawyers "explicitly prohibited government personnel from opening or looking inside any of the boxes" inside a storage room when FBI agents first traveled to his Palm Beach Mar-a-Lago resort in June to retrieve the records.
"The government also developed evidence that government records were likely concealed and removed from the Storage Room and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation," the department said in a filing in US District Court in the Southern District of Florida.
It released a photograph of some of the records found inside Trump's home bearing classification markings.
The Justice Department has accused Trump of obstructing justice by failing to return top secret documents to the government.
Trump has been calling for a federal judge to appoint a Special Master to review the records in question. The Justice Department on Tuesday said it opposed the appointment of a special master.
Trump's defenses for why he retained the materials have shifted, and he has not offered a reason for why he did not give all the records back.
He has previously claimed he declassified all the records, pointing to a president's broad declassification powers.
However, Tuesday's filing by the government denied this.
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