“It 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’s 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,” wrote Gary Stern, the agency’s chief counsel, in an email to Trump lawyers in May 2021, according to a copy reviewed by The Washington Post.
Stern, the chief counsel at the Archives, does not say in the email how he determined that the boxes were in Trump’s possession. He wrote that he also had consulted another Trump lawyer during the final days of Trump’s presidency — without any luck. “I had also raised this concern with Scott in the final weeks,” Stern writes in the email, referring to Trump lawyer Scott Gast, who is also copied on the email.
Stern’s email to three Trump lawyers takes an almost pleading tone at times. Cipollone is not copied on the email, which is sent to Gast and two longtime Cipollone deputies. “We know things are very chaotic, as they always are in the course of a one-term transition,” Stern writes. “ … But it is absolutely necessary that we obtain and account for all presidential records.”
Anyone else would be sitting in jail right now...