**DISCLAIMER: This article was first published in October of 2022**
Bombshell reporting from the New York Times effectively blew the lid off an alleged, albeit unfruitful plot by ex-President Donald Trump, in which he reportedly told his aides that he wanted to cut a deal with the National Archives and Records Administration where he would return the numerous documents and materials he stole from the White House and stashed at his unsecured Mar-a-Lago country club/home, in exchange for NARA giving him “sensitive” documents that he believed cleared his name in regard to the allegations that his 2016 presidential campaign conspired with Russia.
New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt wrote that the scandal-ridden ex-president heavily pressured his aides to outright lie about what documents and materials he took from the White House at the end of his presidency and continued to hide at his Palm Beach estate turned post-presidency personal residence. This left not only his closest aides but his own team of attorneys in serious legal jeopardy.
“Mr. Trump, still determined to show he had been wronged by the F.B.I. investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, was angry with the National Archives and Records Administration for its unwillingness to hand over a batch of sensitive documents that he thought proved his claims,” the Times report reads, going on to add, “In exchange for those documents, Mr. Trump told advisers, he would return to the National Archives the boxes of material he had taken to Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla.”
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The report notes that the ex-president’s aides “never pursued” the plot, but that the incident “…demonstrates how Mr. Trump spent a year and a half deflecting, delaying, and sometimes leading aides to dissemble when it came to demands from the National Archives and ultimately the Justice Department to return the material he had taken, interviews and documents show.”
“Mr. Trump floated the idea of offering the deal to return the boxes in exchange for documents he believed would expose the Russia investigation as a ‘hoax’ cooked up by the F.B.I. Mr. Trump did not appear to know specifically what he thought the archives had — only that there were items he wanted,” the Times report goes on to read.
This bombshell reporting came on the heels of revelations that the US Department of Justice allegedly believed that additional documents and materials still remained at Donald Trump’s compound.
Read the full report from the New York Times here.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
