The Daily Fuckup

By May 14, 2022, the Mar-a-Lago records fight was already beyond routine records handling. In a later indictment, Justice Department prosecutors said the FBI opened a criminal investigation on March 30 and that a federal grand jury opened an investigation on April 26. The same filing says the grand jury issued a subpoena on May 11, 2022, seeking all documents with classification markings in the possession, custody, or control of Donald Trump or the Office of Donald J. Trump.

National Archives records show that the access fight was moving on a separate but related track at the same time. In a May 10 letter to Trump representative Evan Corcoran, Acting Archivist Debra Steidel Wall rejected the former president’s privilege claim and said NARA would provide the FBI access to the records in question beginning as early as May 12. That letter followed a request from the White House Counsel’s Office, which had transmitted the Justice Department’s request for FBI review of the 15 boxes.

Those facts matter because they fix the date. On May 14, this was already a subpoena-backed federal inquiry, even if many of the later obstruction details were still hidden from public view. The later indictment described box-moving, searches of the storage room, and a certification submitted after the June 2 review; none of that had been disclosed yet on May 14. What was already clear was simpler and more serious: the records dispute had become an active federal enforcement matter, with investigators, archives officials, and Trump’s lawyers all inside the same problem set.