On June 19, former president Donald Trump sent a letter to the National Archives. The subject was not his ongoing dispute with the agency over material he’d removed from the White House and brought to his Mar-a-Lago resort. Instead, he was naming two individuals — former Trump administration official Kash P. Patel and conservative writer John Solomon — as “representatives for access to Presidential records of my administration.”
In light of what we’ve learned in the week since FBI agents searched Mar-a-Lago and removed dozens of boxes of material, the timing of that appointment is interesting.
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A full timeline of what unfolded before the FBI search is below, but June was a significant month for the government’s effort to retrieve the material.
By then, the Archives had already referred the issue to the Justice Department and a grand jury had issued a subpoena for the recovery of material. On June 3, a senior official from the department visited Mar-a-Lago along with several FBI agents, reviewing the storage room where much of the material seized last week would be recovered. They would soon ask that the room “be secured” — suggesting that it may not have been secured previously — and the material within it not be moved. A few days later, the New York Times reported over the weekend, a lawyer for Trump signed a document indicating that no further classified material remained at Mar-a-Lago.
On June 22, the Justice Department subpoenaed security footage from Mar-a-Lago, including near the storage room. Trump’s team turned it over.
“According to a person briefed on the matter, the footage showed that, after one instance in which Justice Department officials were in contact with Mr. Trump’s team, boxes were moved in and out of the room,” the Times reported.
In the midst of all of this and three days before that subpoena, Patel and Solomon were tapped as authorized consumers of Trump’s records. In explaining the decision to Politico, Solomon indicated that the intent was that he write a history of the Russia investigation — one that a Trump spokesperson justifiably expected to be favorable in a statement to the outlet.
After it was reported that the material Trump turned over in January included classified material, Patel spoke with Breitbart to offer a defense that’s cropped up a lot in the interim: Trump had actually declassified all of it in advance.
This could have been self-serving. As an administration official, Patel probably had a high level of security clearance though, as journalist Marcy Wheeler noted in an assessment of the Solomon-Patel appointment, that may have been rescinded as a part of an investigation into whether he leaked classified information. If he’d seen what Trump had in that storage room, Wheeler points out, Trump could be further criminally implicated. The same goes for Solomon: as a news writer, he would not have had clearance to view those documents.
Perhaps this is a coincidence. Perhaps Trump just got around to naming Patel and Solomon as he’d intended to do all along.
Or, perhaps, he and his team understood that the government’s interest in what he had in that storage room near the Mar-a-Lago pool hadn’t waned, and that it would be useful to loop his two allies into the community of people with some credible authorization for viewing what he’d taken from the White House. Perhaps he understood that he wouldn’t be able to retain the documents indefinitely and so wanted his defenders to have the legal authority to take a look.
One wonders if maybe they already had.
The Washington Post has requested comment from Patel and Solomon, and will update this story with any responses.
In light of what we’ve learned in the week since FBI agents searched Mar-a-Lago and removed dozens of boxes of material, the timing of that appointment is interesting.
Sign up for How To Read This Chart, a weekly data newsletter from Philip Bump
A full timeline of what unfolded before the FBI search is below, but June was a significant month for the government’s effort to retrieve the material.
By then, the Archives had already referred the issue to the Justice Department and a grand jury had issued a subpoena for the recovery of material. On June 3, a senior official from the department visited Mar-a-Lago along with several FBI agents, reviewing the storage room where much of the material seized last week would be recovered. They would soon ask that the room “be secured” — suggesting that it may not have been secured previously — and the material within it not be moved. A few days later, the New York Times reported over the weekend, a lawyer for Trump signed a document indicating that no further classified material remained at Mar-a-Lago.
On June 22, the Justice Department subpoenaed security footage from Mar-a-Lago, including near the storage room. Trump’s team turned it over.
“According to a person briefed on the matter, the footage showed that, after one instance in which Justice Department officials were in contact with Mr. Trump’s team, boxes were moved in and out of the room,” the Times reported.
In the midst of all of this and three days before that subpoena, Patel and Solomon were tapped as authorized consumers of Trump’s records. In explaining the decision to Politico, Solomon indicated that the intent was that he write a history of the Russia investigation — one that a Trump spokesperson justifiably expected to be favorable in a statement to the outlet.
After it was reported that the material Trump turned over in January included classified material, Patel spoke with Breitbart to offer a defense that’s cropped up a lot in the interim: Trump had actually declassified all of it in advance.
This could have been self-serving. As an administration official, Patel probably had a high level of security clearance though, as journalist Marcy Wheeler noted in an assessment of the Solomon-Patel appointment, that may have been rescinded as a part of an investigation into whether he leaked classified information. If he’d seen what Trump had in that storage room, Wheeler points out, Trump could be further criminally implicated. The same goes for Solomon: as a news writer, he would not have had clearance to view those documents.
Perhaps this is a coincidence. Perhaps Trump just got around to naming Patel and Solomon as he’d intended to do all along.
Or, perhaps, he and his team understood that the government’s interest in what he had in that storage room near the Mar-a-Lago pool hadn’t waned, and that it would be useful to loop his two allies into the community of people with some credible authorization for viewing what he’d taken from the White House. Perhaps he understood that he wouldn’t be able to retain the documents indefinitely and so wanted his defenders to have the legal authority to take a look.
One wonders if maybe they already had.
The Washington Post has requested comment from Patel and Solomon, and will update this story with any responses.