Ex-Trump aide pledged to release classified documents long before FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid

Loyalist DoD aide has remained at Trump’s side since 2021

A Trump administration aide who remained in the ex-president’s inner circle after the events of January 6 and Mr Trump’s exit from the White House days later was leading an effort to obtain documents through the National Archives months before the FBI’s raid to obtain classified materials from Mar-a-Lago.

Kash Patel, a former appointee at the Department of Defense, was heading up a campaign to obtain documents from the Archives related to a host of topics, including the investigation into Mr Trump’s 2016 campaign, his 2020 impeachment, and even January 6. The campaign was being led at Donald Trump’s behest; the former president and Mr Patel apparently wanted to obtain documents the president had ordered declassified just before leaving the White House.

ABC News reported the efforts for the first time on Thursday.

There’s no indication that Mr Patel did anything besides go through the proper channels in attempts to obtain documents from the Archives. He is not accused of any wrongdoing. But the episode is important because it proves that at least some members of Donald Trump’s closest team of advisers were well aware of the proper procedure for obtaining documents from the Archives amid accusations that Mr Trump was illegally harboring classified materials at Mar-a-Lago.

According to Mr Patel in one interview flagged by ABC in its reporting, however, Mr Trump himself wanted the documents transferred to his possession as he left the White House — which is not proper procedure. Mr Patel ironically complained in the interview that White House staffers had followed proper protocol and returned those documents in question to the Archives.

"White House counsel and company disobeyed a presidential order and implemented federal governmental bureaucracy on the way out to basically send the stash to the National Archives, and now that's where it's at," he said in June, according to ABC.

A spokesperson for Mr Patel told the news outlet that the former DoD aide was appointed as "a representative on behalf of President Trump to work with the National Archives to get them to disclose information."

"The GSA has their own policies and procedures for how presidential records must be handled, which Patel is in full cooperation with," they said.

The former president has fiercely denied that he was illegally holding classified materials at Mar-a-Lago and falsely accused former President Barack Obama of committing the same violation in the effort to construct his presidential library. Mr Obama is known to have worked with the Archives to obtain documents for the project, and has never been accused by a credible source of any wrongdoing in the matter.

Mr Trump has also launched a campaign to malign the FBI and the Justice Department for its execution of a search warrant against him; he has baselessly accused the agencies of planting evidence in the seized boxes of documents and at least one act of violence has already been carried out targeting the FBI since the raid and his criticism of federal law enforcement began.