Judge declines to act on Justice Department contempt request in Trump documents case

A federal judge in Washington on Friday ended a hearing without acting on a Justice Department request to find representatives of Donald Trump's post-presidential office in contempt of court for failing to comply fully with a subpoena demanding that he return all classified documents he had taken with him when he left office, two people familiar with the matter said.

They said that the judge left it to the Justice Department and Trump's team to resolve the department's concerns about whether the former president might have more classified documents at his properties after more than a year of efforts by the federal government to retrieve them.

It was unclear after the closed-door proceeding if the judge, Beryl A. Howell, had left open the possibility of ruling on the matter at a future date. Several news outlets filed a letter asking the judge to unseal the proceedings, including the New York Times.

Howell had been asked by the Justice Department to decide whether to impose financial penalties or issue a contempt finding if no one from Trump's office agreed to state under oath that, to the best of their knowledge, all of the classified materials he took from the White House when he left office last year have been returned to the government.

The 80-minute hearing, in U.S. District Court in Washington, was held after Trump's team acknowledged having turned up more government documents in a recent search of his properties. The hearing was not open to the public because of grand jury secrecy rules. Howell, as the chief judge for the District of Columbia federal district courts, oversees grand jury proceedings.

The request by the government, first reported Thursday by the Washington Post, came after months of frustration in the Justice Department with the former president and his lawyers, who have repeatedly made assurances to prosecutors that the sensitive materials had all been returned — only to find out there were more.

The fact that Howell had been asked to mull a contempt finding suggests that the Justice Department has taken a newly aggressive stance toward Trump's long-delayed response to the government's efforts to retrieve a trove of sensitive records that he took from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida.

Around Thanksgiving, a team of experts hired by Trump concluded searches that included other locations — among them, Trump Tower in New York; his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey; and a storage facility near Mar-a-Lago. At the storage facility, the team discovered at least two documents that bore classification markings, prompting lawyers for the former president to notify prosecutors about them.

The Trump team provided a written statement that it had returned everything it had found, according to the two people familiar with the matter.

But the discovery of additional material further undercut an affidavit that some of Trump's other lawyers had drafted and signed in June, saying that they had done a "diligent" search of his properties and that to the best of their knowledge, no classified material remained in his possession.

The attestation in June was signed by a lawyer for Trump named Christina Bobb and drafted by another named Evan Corcoran. Corcoran was among the lawyers in court for Trump's team Friday, all of whom left the courthouse without speaking to reporters.

Two months later, in August, FBI agents carried out a court-authorized search of Mar-a-Lago and came away with 26 boxes, including 11 sets of material marked as classified, comprising scores of additional documents. One set had the highest level of classification, top secret/sensitive compartmented information.

It came weeks after the Justice Department named a special counsel, Jack Smith, to oversee the investigation into whether Trump had illegally kept national security documents at his private property and obstructed the government's attempts to get them back. Smith is also overseeing the criminal investigation into efforts by Trump and his allies to reverse the results of the 2020 election.

Some lawyers who have worked with Smith's team have said they were told that the Justice Department would no longer pull punches in seeking to enforce court orders or subpoenas.

The initial grand jury subpoena for the documents was issued in May after officials with the National Archives, after nearly a year of attempts, retrieved 15 boxes of material from Trump's club at Mar-a-Lago in January and discovered that they contained dozens of classified documents.