According to people familiar with the matter, the Justice Department suspects that former President Donald Trump may still have classified documents that he removed from the White House.
According to NBC, the head of counterintelligence matters at the DOJ told Trump's attorneys that he didn't turn over all the government documents he took when he left office.
The news was first reported by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The records were marked classified.
The acting Archivist of the United States said in a letter to the House Oversight and Reform Committee that the National Archives and Records Administration has not recovered White House staff records that are contained on non- official electronic accounts.
The records that Trump turned over to the agency were marked with classified information.
CNBC requested comment from the DOJ and a spokeswoman for Trump, but they did not respond.
The Aug. 8 raid at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach was part of an ongoing criminal investigation of Trump for the removal of government records when he left office.
The records are owned by the United States government.
There were empty file folders that were marked classified, according to the DOJ. Officials complain that a judge's ruling temporarily barring the DOJ from examining the seized classified documents "seems to bar the FBI and DOJ" from a review that could identify other records that are still missing."
Although the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, where Trump resides in non- summer months, agents did not search either his residence in Bedminster, New Jersey or his apartment in New York City.
The Daily Mail published a video of Trump in May 2021 boarding a jet from Mar-a-Lago as files were being loaded on the plane. The president was going to Bedminster.
According to the Times report, Trump's lawyers are at odds over how to respond to the DOJ's suspicion that the former president still has classified material. Chris Kise is one of the attorneys who suggested that Trump retained a forensic accounting firm. The report states that other attorneys discouraged Trump from that route.
The legal situation is complicated by the latest reports on the missing documents.
Judges in four federal courts, including the Supreme Court, are dealing with disputes between Trump's lawyers and the DOJ over the parameters and timing of the use of the records
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