At least two items marked as classified were found in a storage unit in Florida after lawyers for former US president Donald Trump arranged for a firm to search for additional material, according to a report.
The Washington Post said the items were discovered by an outside team brought in by Mr Trump’s representatives to search his other properties for any additional classified materials.
The nature of the classified materials was not immediately clear, but the storage unit in which they were found in West Palm Beach had been used to hold items from an office in northern Virginia used by Trump staff after he left office, the newspaper said.
The FBI recovered roughly 100 documents marked as classified during an August 8th search of Mr Trump’s Palm Beach estate, Mar-a-Lago, on top of 37 documents bearing classification markings that his lawyers retrieved from the home during a June visit, as well as 15 boxes containing about 184 classified documents recovered in January by the National Archives and Records Administration.
The possibility that the US Justice Department had not yet recovered all classified materials had existed for months.
The FBI’s August search of the home came after investigators developed evidence indicating that additional sensitive documents remained there, even though Trump representatives had certified that all classified documents requested in a Justice Department subpoena had been located and returned.
After a federal judge pressured the Trump team to demonstrate its full compliance with the subpoena, the newspaper said, it hired an outside firm to search properties including the former president’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, as well as Trump Tower in New York.
A spokesman for Mr Trump, responding to reports about an outside firm’s search for classified materials, said in a statement that the ex-president and his counsel “continue to be co-operative and transparent, despite the unprecedented, illegal and unwarranted attack against President Trump and his family by the weaponised Department of Justice”.
