Federal investigators attempted to retrieve highly classified documents that Donald Trump improperly removed from the White House by presenting him with a grand jury subpoena this past spring, months before FBI agents would execute a search warrant at his Palm Beach, Florida home.
The existence of the subpoena, which was issued by a Washington, DC grand jury and used by Department of Justice investigators to retrieve some — but not all — of the documents sought from Mr Trump’s home, was first reported by John Solomon, a right-wing journalist who Mr Trump named as one of his official representatives to the National Archives and Records Administration just before his term expired on 20 January 2021.
In the days since FBI agents executed a search warrant on Mr Trump’s home and office at his Mar-a-Lago club, allies of the former president have claimed that the warrant represented an overreach by the Justice Department because other, less coercive methods could have been used if the department felt Mr Trump was still harbouring sensitive materials at his residence. But the fact that a subpoena was issued months prior to the use of a search warrant suggests that investigators believed Mr Trump did not fully comply with it.
According to The New York Times, two sources who had been briefed on the documents sought by the FBI said they were “so sensitive in nature, and related to national security, that the Justice Department had to act”.