![\"President](\"https:\/\/abovethelaw.com\/uploads\/2017\/02\/Trump-pointing-300x200.jpg\")
<\/p>\n(Photo by Andrew Harrer \u2013 Pool\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Another day, another hugely damaging revelation about Trump\u2019s deliberate removal (cough, cough theft<\/em>) of government documents, as the Washington Post<\/a> reveals that the National Archives (NARA) was already trying to retrieve material Donald Trump had squirreled away in his residence before he even left office. And they knew he had it because White House Counsel Pat Cipollone told them they should collect that stuff before Trump made off with it.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is also our understanding that roughly two dozen boxes of original presidential records were kept in the Residence of the White House over the course of President Trump\u2019s last year in office and have not been transferred to NARA, despite a determination by Pat Cipollone in the final days of the administration that they need to be,\u201d NARA\u2019s General Counsel Gary Stern wrote to Trump\u2019s lawyers in May 2021.<\/p>\n The email was part of a long campaign to get back government property, including not only the highly classified documents which prompted the Justice Department to open a grand jury investigation and execute that search warrant on August 8, but also items of a purely sentimental value, such as a \u201clove letter\u201d from North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and a mock-up bollard from his \u201cF U Mexico\u201d wall.<\/p>\n The\u00a0Post<\/em> reports that Stern spent months trying to get the documents back, to no avail, despite the intercession of Cipollone and his former deputy Pat Philbin.<\/p>\n \u201cWe know things are very chaotic, as they always are in the course of a one-term transition,\u201d Stern wheedled, \u201c \u2026 But it is absolutely necessary that we obtain and account for all presidential records.\u201d<\/p>\n In fact, Trump only started returning some of the stuff he improperly retained (cough, cough stole<\/em>) when NARA said it was going to have to refer the matter to Congress.<\/p>\n Kinda gives the lie to Team Trump\u2019s shouting from the rooftops and then in that garbage motion<\/a> they filed Monday that\u00a0\u201cAll facts laid out herein show that there was complete cooperation between President Trump, his team, and the appropriate agencies.\u201d<\/p>\n So perhaps it\u2019s not surprising that Cipollone and Philbin, as well as John Eisenberg, all of whom had dutifully worked to flout congressional oversight and hide the fact that Trump had attempted to extort the President of Ukraine for dirt on Joe Biden, refused to play along<\/a> when NARA went looking for a Trumpland lawyer to review the seized documents before they could be released to DOJ as part of its investigation.<\/p>\n But you know who did play along?\u00a0Evan Corcoran<\/em>, the Baltimore lawyer who put his name on that ridiculous motion claiming total cooperation, despite the fact that he, as one of the the only lawyers<\/a> willing to do it, had been negotiating with the Justice Department and the Archives for months, even as his client retained numerous top secret government documents after being subpoenaed for their return. Although props for describing Trump as \u201cvoluntarily accept[ing] service of a grand jury subpoena,\u201d while glossing over the fact that he never complied with it.<\/p>\n Not a great look, TBH.<\/p>\n