The New York Times reports:
Late last year, as the National Archives ratcheted up the pressure on former President Donald J. Trump to return boxes of records he had taken from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago club, he came up with an idea to resolve the looming showdown: cut a deal.
Mr. Trump, still determined to show he had been wronged by the F.B.I. investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, was angry with the National Archives and Records Administration for its unwillingness to hand over a batch of sensitive documents that he thought proved his claims.
In exchange for those documents, Mr. Trump told advisers, he would return to the National Archives the boxes of material he had taken to Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla.
Read the full article.
After being urged to just ship the boxes to NARA as they were, Trump is said to have gone through the boxes himself before giving stuff to archives in December. They were retrieved in Jan, and shortly thereafter, NARA believed they were still missing stuff https://t.co/ZRTzQUBqDY
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) October 8, 2022
NEW HABERMAN SCOOP: Trump Told Aides He Would Trade Documents He Took To Mar-a-Lago For FBI’s Russia Files https://t.co/wrByhMQvZG
— Mediaite (@Mediaite) October 8, 2022