After Trump’s term ended in January 2021, Archives officials identified various high-profile items that had not been sent to their collection and requested they be located and turned over. What followed was a tortured standoff among Trump; some of his own advisers, who urged the return of documents; and the bureaucrats charged by the law with maintaining and protecting presidential records. Trump only agreed to return some of the documents after a National Archives official asked a Trump adviser for help, saying they may have to soon refer the matter to Congress or the Justice Department.
Nearly a year later, on Jan. 17, 2022, Trump returned 15 boxes of newspaper clips, presidential briefing papers, handwritten notes and assorted mementos to the National Archives. That was supposed to settle the issue.
Instead, when Archives employees began opening up and sifting through the material, they noticed an immediate problem. The boxes arrived without any kind of logs or inventories to describe their content, according to a person familiar with the recovery. Instead, they contained a hodgepodge of documents, including some that didn’t even come from Trump’s time in the White House.