Trump lawyer appeared to agree he should return government documents, old email shows, undermining his later defense

• The National Archives and Trump have been at odds.

• There is a request for the return of secret documents.

• It looked like it showed Trump's staff agreeing they should be back.

A newly published email from the legal fight over secret documents shows that Donald Trump's lawyers agreed that the files should be returned.

Gary Stein is a lawyer working for the National Archives and Records Administration.

The email shows that Trump's top counsel offered no objection to the contact the agency made with his lawyers.

It was said that Pat Cipollone, who was White House counsel to Trump, agreed that the records should be returned.

Despite his counsel's admission that the documents were not his property, Trump refused to give the full records to the NARA. According to The New York Times, the former president described all of the records as his.

The message shows how long it took to get the documents from Trump before the search warrant was issued.

Over the course of President Trump's last year in office, roughly two dozen boxes of original presidential records were kept in the residence of the white house.

Despite a determination by Pat Cipollone in the final days of the administration that they need to be, they weren't given back.

In the course of a one-term transition, things are very chaotic and we need to account for all presidential records.

In the wake of leaving office, Trump has come under fire for his handling of presidential records.

The National Archives revealed in January that Trump had taken top-level secrets with him, despite his repeated refusal to hand them over.

The email didn't say anything about the classification level of the records it was looking for.

Trump has sought to portray the investigation as part of a political plot against him, and his allies have claimed that the government did not do enough to resolve the matter without raiding his property.

The National Archives sought Trump's help in recovering the records before he left office, and his lawyer made no objection to them being retrieved, according to the letter.

Representatives for Trump have been contacted.

Business Insider has an article on it.