Federal prosecutors have asked for the contempt charge after months of obfuscation from Trump’s legal team, the Washington Post reported.
So far the judge, Beryl Howell of the DC District, has not issued a ruling over the request.
Trump’s office was handed a subpoena in May demanding the return of all classified documents.
All presidential records must be handed over to the National Archive when a president leaves office, but Trump has not complied with the law.
Prosecutors have pushed the former president’s legal team to appoint a custodian of records, who could swear, under penalty of perjury, that all documents have been returned.
So far none of Trump’s lawyers have been willing to put their name to such a statement.
January 6: The day that rattled American democracy
“There seems to be confusion as to the ‘picture’ where documents were sloppily thrown on the floor and then released photographically for the world to see, as if that’s what the FBI found when they broke into my home. Wrong!” he wrote on his social media site earlier this year.
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“They took them out of cartons and spread them around on the carpet, making it look like a big ‘find’ for them.
“They dropped them, not me.”
Yesterday it was revealed two more classified documents were found at a storage facility in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Whether Trump himself is indicted over the mishandling of classified documents is up to special counsel Jack Smith.
Smith, a veteran prosecutor, was tapped by Attorney-General Merrick Garland to be an independent investigator at the Department of Justice.
Smith will recommend to Garland whether to press charges against Trump for this potential crime, among several others being investigated.
Smith has also issued subpoenas for records this week from three states where Trump sought to overturn the 2020 election results.
Trump launched another bid for the presidency last month, but has spent nearly all of his time since in Mar-a-Lago.
