By law, at the end of his term, Trump was to hand over these documents and memorabilia, which also included correspondence from former US President Barack Obama, to the Archives, but instead arrived at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach.
David Ferrero, in charge of the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), told AFP that the agency is going after any records it knows have been “inappropriately removed or not properly transferred to official accounts”.
He added: “Keeping records or transferring them in a timely manner to the national archives with the expiry of the mandate does not require perseverance and vigilance. Records are important.”
According to the Archives, it did not obtain these documents until mid-January, ie a delay of nearly a year.
The recovery of the boxes has raised questions about Trump’s compliance with presidential records laws that were put in place after the Watergate scandal in the 1970s and require presidents to keep records of their presidential activity.
Trump failed last month to stop the delivery of documents from the White House to the House committee investigating the events on the Capitol building in 2021.
And the Washington Post reported that when Trump left Washington, he decided to take several boxes with him to his residence in Mar-a-Lago.
Among the items in these boxes were gifts from foreign leaders, a letter left to him by his predecessor Barack Obama, and several letters written by Kim Jong-un.
In September 2018, Trump told supporters that Kim “written me beautiful letters, they are wonderful letters. We fell in love.”
According to the Washington Post, officials from the National Archives Department traveled to Florida last month to retrieve these boxes, including Kim’s letters.
The authority noted last week that the former president had a habit of tearing up some work documents, in an additional practice that contradicts legally imposed rules.
She explained that “responsible for managing documents in the White House” were able to “re-paste” some of the papers “with adhesive tape”, while other papers remained torn.
“Representatives of former US President Trump have confirmed that they continue to search for additional presidential records from the National Archives,” the Archives said.