It has been revealed that Donald Trump left a "gracious" note for Joe Biden after departing the White House, as aides disclosed the list of shambles that led to last week's Mar-a-Lago raid.
In the Oval Office, newly elected president Joe Biden discovered a letter from his predecessor ready for him, according to sources and notes chronicling the final four days of the Trump administration, The New York Times reported.
According to reports, Trump wrote the letter by hand on two lengthy pages, and Biden remarked to a staff member that the former president "had been more kind in the letter than he had anticipated."
The letter will be among the first documents Biden must hand over to the National Archives when he leaves the White House, though its contents have not been made public.
According to Trump's aides, the FBI investigation into the removal of sensitive papers was spurred by attempts by the National Archive to obtain a message Barack Obama had left for Trump as well as correspondence with Kim Jong Un.
A sequence of errors led to the failure to turn over two dozen boxes of records, which prompted a raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago property. As a result, the FBI is now looking into the procedure.Trump says he intends to sue and has dismissed any impropriety claims.According to those who talked with the Times, rather than a malicious attempt to exploit sensitive material, the event was the result of poor organization among Trump's employees.
According to sources who spoke with the Times, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows promised staff members that he would make sure the administration met with the rules for leaving the records for the National Archive in a haste to leave the White House.
However, they observed that Trump was more concerned with "pushing through last-minute pardons" as he disregarded the transfer of power and continued to make unproven assertions that the 2020 presidential race had been rigged against him.
The two dozen boxes, which contained documents designated "highly sensitive" and letters from the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, were supposed to be turned in, according to the White House Counsel's Office, but they ended up in Mar-a-Lago.
Every document produced in the Oval Office is required to be turned over to the National Archives under the Presidential Records Act, which specifies how to handle records made there.
Former officials told the Times that Donald McGahn, Trump's first White House Counsel, had established a system for the handling of materials and had given staff members lectures on the law.
They continued by saying that after the 2020 election, there were multiple discussions about sending someone to gather the paperwork that had been accumulating in Trump's estate.
White House Counsel Pat Cippollone and his assistant, Patrick Philbin, "were fully aware that [Trump's] handling of records constituted a possible concern" in the closing days of the presidency, according to the Times.Despite the concerns, it was unclear how much influence Cippollone had over Trump because, according to former officials, the ex-president frequently reprimanded the lawyer for raising doubts about the allegations of election fraud.
White House Staff Secretary Derek Lyons, who oversaw the paperwork in the Oval Office and was alleged to have broken down with Trump along with Cippollone, resigned on December 18, 2020, just one month before the major departure.
As a result, Meadows was left without an executive to facilitate the transfer of authority, something Trump vehemently opposed.
Meadow made every attempt to have everything in place by the time Trump left office in January 2021, but National Archives officials quickly noticed that important materials were missing.
The letters from Kim Jong-Un to the president and one that Barack Obama left for Trump at the beginning of his presidency, both of which are thought to have great historical importance, were of particular interest to archivists.Officials from the National Archive pressured Trump's attorneys to return the documents, but they weren't able to do so until they traveled directly to Mar-a-Lago to acquire 15 boxes of data in January 2022.
The Times said that the archivists who gathered the materials also admitted to Trump's staff that they did not keep any records of his usage of social media or of any official communications made through email while in the White House.
The officials forwarded the case to the Justice Department, which interrogated Scott Gast, Cippollone, and Philbin in addition to Cippollone.
Mike Pence, the former vice president, had the exact opposite experience from Trump's team, who struggled to prepare for a seamless transfer of power.
Three former officials with knowledge of their work told the Times that his chief of staff Marc Short and counsel Greg Jacobs oversaw a thorough cataloguing and boxing up of all of Pence's federal materials.
It was their swift and effective effort that "ensured Mr. Pence departed office without a single paper that did not belong to him," according to sources.
When asked explicitly if he had kept any secret material after leaving office, Pence replied, "No, not to my knowledge," according to an interview with The Associated Press on Friday.
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