The Justice Department has recovered more than 300 classified documents taken by former president Donald Trump after he left office in 2021, starting with a batch of 150 that were retrieved by the National Archives in January.
This according to reporting late Monday in the New York Times, which says the initial find in January triggered the Justice Department to move urgently to hunt down any other classified materials the former president may have.
Additional documents were turned over by Trump aides in early June, but the search warrant executed on Aug. 8 at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Florida golf club turned up an additional 11 boxes of material marked as classified.
One set had the highest level of classification – top secret/sensitive compartmented information.
In the wake of that discovery, the Justice Department made a request for video surveillance footage from the club, suggesting that there are concerns about how the classified information was handled by Trump and his staff before the search.