According to reporting by NBC News, former President Donald Trump may have more documents he removed from the White House in his possession.
The report, published on Friday (October 7), details how sources familiar with the case relayed concerns within the Department.
According to the sources, the Department of Justice’s top counterintelligence official, Jay Bratt, had communicated that concern with the former President.
The NBC News report comes a day after The New York Times published a similar piece, and so did The Washington Post.
Each of the reports leaves critical questions unanswered.
One of those questions is whether the DOJ has concrete evidence to support its belief that Trump still has classified material in his possession or whether the suspicions are based on inferences. Inferences center around the empty envelopes with classified markings or the assertion from the National Archives that some Presidential documents are missing.
The latter has been supported by court filings from the Department suggesting there are still missing documents.
One notable mention of the concern that Trump is still holding onto classified documents, came in the DOJ’s opposition to District Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling that the Department not have access to the classified documents seized from Mar-a-Lago until the Special Master had reviewed them.
In the opposition to the ruling, the DOJ wrote that Aileen “appears to bar the FBI and DOJ from further reviewing the records to discern any patterns in the types of records that were retained, which could lead to identification of other records still missing.”
The DOJ was granted its desire to review the classified documents seized from Trump, which hasn’t seemed to wane suspicions.
