return dozens of highly classified documents, this despite several requests over several months. the justice department also released its most visual piece of evidence and you re looking at it, that is a photo showing documents with the highest classification markings laid out there by the fbi, officials say those documents were recovered from a container that trump kept at his mar-a-lago home. since january, the u.s. government has recovered more than 320 classified documents from mar-a-lago. the justice department says three of those classified documents were not in boxes in that storage facility. they were actually found in former president trump s desk. so let s begin this morning with all of that news and this stunning filing from the doj, with our correspondent kara scannell. this is why doj needed 40 pages. they needed twice what the court said they could have because they had to apparently lay all of this out. yeah, good morning, jim and poppy. part of the objecti
flint, michigan. up first just before midnight justice department legal filing and what it tells us about the case against donald trump. the 36-page filing is full of critical new details. they include three classified documents in desks inside the former president s office. more than 100 documents in 13 boxes with classification markings inside the former president s residence. some of those documents so secret the fbi and d orkoj persl charged with reviewing them needed to get additional security clearances. the filing includes this stunning photograph, a smattering of highly classified documents with unmistakably clear, top secret and sci markings laid out on a mar-a-lago carpet next to a time of framed magazine covers and this, too, justice department lawyers now allege mr. trump and his attorneys likely committed a crime by obstructing a federal investigation. stopping fbi agents from looking through boxes of records and in one instance, signing off on a sworn statemen
filing. all right. let s beginning this morning with kara scannell. kara, these are stunning developments. walk us through the key the key revelations that tells us so much. yeah, i mean, what we ve really learned from this, from the department of justice filing, they say when they went and executed this search warrant at mar-a-lago three weeks ago they recovered twice as many classified documents than what the former president s legal team had given them pursuant to a grand jury subpoena in june. so this all goes right to the department of justice s position that the trump team has not been cooperative with this investigation, they re really trying to put forth a counternarrative him. they say that the fbi in a matter of hours recovered twice as many documents with classification markings as the diligent search that the former president s counsel and other representatives had weeks to perform, calls into serious question the representations made in the june 3rd certifi
subpoena and finally a search, investigators have retrieved 48 boxes including at least 320 classified documents, including 72 marked confidential, 108 secret, and 42 top secret. now, the filing as one former top fbi official puts it obliterates claims that the fo former president and his lawyers had been cooperating and negotiating in good faith to return the records. okay. so let s lay out the time line for you. the national archives had been working for months to get all of these missing records from trump even while he was in office. in january of this year, they finally got 15 boxes of records that trump had taken with him to mar-a-lago, though they did not belong to him. once the national archives saw the reckless way trump had handled so much sensitive information, they contacted the doj for help getting other classified documents back that were still missing. according to this filing, one of the most significant concerns was that highly classified records were unfol
than 300 classified documents were found at mar-a-lago since trump left office, and not all of them in that unsecured storage room. the doj says three classified documents were found in trump s desk drawer. and as one former top fbi official put it, the new information obliterates claims that trump and his lawyers have been cooperating and negotiating in good faith to return the records. the doj response raises the stakes for the courtroom tomorrow. a judge holds a hearing on whether to appoint the special master, neutral third party to oversee the handling of the seized documents. the justice department opposes it and says a special master is unnecessary, and would significantly harm important governmental interesting, including national security interests. in the filing, the justice department also released this photo of some of the evidence found in the august search. you see the documents here to spread out on the floor by the fbi with some of the highest classifica