Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows may have been implicated in the Mar-a-Lago documents case by one of Donald Trump’s attorneys, according to a new report.
The New York Times reported that Trump attorney Patrick Philbin falsely told the lawyer for the National Archives last September that the former president had taken only non-classified material such as newspaper clippings home with him from the White House, two sources told the New York Times.
Philbin told National Archives lawyer Gary Stern that he learned that information from Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, and one of the sources said Stern preserved his own description of that exchange in an email.
That claim turned out to be false after FBI agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago in August and found thousands of pages of presidential records, including hundreds that contained classified information, stashed in Trump’s office and other areas at the private club.
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Another Trump attorney, Alex Cannon, told the former president in fall 2021 that officials with the archives wanted those materials back and warned him that a criminal referral could result if he refused to comply, according to a person familiar with the discussions, but Trump basically ignored him.
Trump eventually turned over 15 boxes of government materials in January and asked Cannon to tell the archives that those were all the documents he had taken from the White House, but the lawyer declined because he wasn’t sure if that was true.