‘WE DON’T HAVE ANYTHING’

The National Archives and Records Administration had begun to request missing presidential records that spring, saying that the matter would be referred to the Justice Department if Trump did not comply.

But the former president didn’t begin to go through the boxes until November 2021, when Nauta brought them to his residence for review.

Nauta eventually handed over 15 boxes containing 197 classified documents to the Archives on Jan. 17, 2022, of which 98 were “secret,” 30 were “top secret” and the rest were marked “confidential.”

The FBI opened a criminal investigation into the ex-commander in chief ’s retention of the classified documents on March 30, 2022, and a grand jury was empaneled on April 26, 2022.

Prosecutors said Nauta in May 2022 made false and misleading statements to the FBI about the transfer of the documents, claiming he was unaware the boxes were brought to Trump’s private residence and he didn’t know how they had gotten there or where they were stored before.

On May 23, 2022, Trump met with his attorneys to discuss how to respond to a May 11 subpoena from the grand jury.

“I don’t want anybody looking, I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don’t, I don’t want you looking through my boxes,” one of the attorneys summarized the former president’s comments.

Trump also suggested he might not “play ball” with the grand jury’s request and said it would “be better if we just told them we don’t have anything” or “if there are no documents,” the attorney recalled.

At the same meeting, the attorney also recounted that Trump praised Hillary Clinton’s lawyer, who he said had “deleted all of her emails, the 30,000 emails,” adding that “he didn’t get in any trouble because he said that he was the one who deleted them.”