Records show Archives official met with Biden White House counsel day of indictment against Trump
Just the News ^ | 1 May, 2024 | Steven Richards
Posted on 5/2/2024, 7:48:43 AM by MtnClimber
The White House visitor logs show other Nat'l Archives officials visited Biden Administration officials throughout the earliest stages of the probe into President Trump. White House officials met with Nat'l Archives on at least 19 other occasions.
On June 8, 2023, Gary Stern, the General Counsel of the National Archives arrived at the White House for a meeting with Special Counsel to President Biden Richard Sauber. The meeting reportedly took place in the Navy Mess, a “nautical” themed dining room run by the seafaring military branch, according to White House records.
It is not known what Stern and Sauber discussed, but the very same day, the Justice Department filed its indictment against former President Donald Trump alleging he “unlawfully” retained classified documents.
The record of the meeting, obtained from the Biden White House visitor logs is the latest evidence showing the close cooperation between the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Biden White House regarding the Trump classified documents case.
As Just the News recently reported, Stern began communicating with White House officials as early as May 2021 as he sought to retrieve documents retained by former President Trump. The Archives asserts that Trump improperly retained these documents after his term ended, a belief disputed by Trump’s legal team.
Last week, newly unsealed court documents showed that beginning in 2021, the Biden White House coordinated closely with Archives officials, presumably to ratchet up pressure on Trump to return classified documents and coordinated with Justice Department officials to draft a criminal referral.
These efforts came at the same time that President Biden’s staff was made aware of the president’s own classified documents problem.
According to the visitor logs, Stern also met with White House officials on at least 19 other occasions from 2021 to 2023 as his agency sought the documents retained by Trump, though only a handful of meetings were with the White House Counsel’s office.
In early August, records indicate Stern met with then-Deputy White House Counsel Jonathan Su in the West Wing. The unsealed court records show Stern would ultimately consult with Su in January 2022 about his agency’s efforts to retrieve the classified memos from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property, Just the News reported last week.
Su referred Stern to Department of Justice officials, Associate Deputy Attorneys General Emily Loeb and David Newman. It was from this referral that the federal case against the former president was born. Later in 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland would approve an official investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents and would appoint Jack Smith as special counsel to oversee the criminal investigation in November.
Previously, Just the News reported that then-White House Deputy Counsel Jonathan Su was engaged in conversations with the FBI, DOJ, and the National Archives as early as April 2022, shortly after Trump and his associates voluntarily returned 15 boxes of classified documents and other presidential records to the agency. But now, according to the dates referenced in the court documents, these contacts are known to have started months earlier.
In Just the News’s previous reporting, documents showed the Biden White House was engaged in conversations with the FBI, DOJ, and National Archives to facilitate access to the documents for investigators probing the former president’s handling of classified documents, despite publicly claiming it had no prior knowledge about the well-publicized FBI raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago.
On September 1, Stern circulated a draft referral intended for the Justice Department after documents were not returned to seek the agencies assistance.
“Attached is a draft letter that we could consider sending to the Attorney General about missing Trump records,” Stern wrote in an email. “It focuses only on the paper records that we believe to be missing.”
When he circulated the draft letter internally, Stern told colleagues he had been in contact with “DOJ counsel” about the matter and was continuing to communicate with the White House Counsel’s Office, showing the Biden administration was in the loop about the efforts to repossess Trump’s documents.
The draft letter urged the Attorney General to assist NARA in recovering presidential records “unlawfully removed from the U.S. Government custody or possibly destroyed in violation of the Presidential Records Act (PRA).”
