Sources and notes describing the last four days of the Trump presidency showed that upon entering the Oval Office, freshly elected president Joe Biden discovered a letter waiting for him from his predecessor, The New York Times reported.
The letter was reportedly handwritten by Trump himself on two large pages, with Biden commenting to an aide that the former president "had been more gracious in the letter than he had anticipated."
Its contents have not been announced, yet the letter will be among the first records Biden will have to turn over to the National Archives when he leaves the White House.
Aides state it was the very same process that landed Trump in trouble with the FBI, after attempts by the National Archive to retrieve the note Barack Obama had left for Trump, as well as correspondence with Kim Jong un, ignited a wider investigation into the removal of classified documents.
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It's a process that has landed Trump in the midst of a FBI investigation, after a series of mistakes that ended in a failure to turn over two dozen boxes of documents, leading to a raid on his Mar-a-Lago home.
Trump has denied accusations of wrongdoing and states he intends to sue.
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Those who spoke to the Times proposed the incident had arisen from poor organization among Trump's staff, rather than because of any malign effort to misuse secret information.
Sources explained to the Times that in the hurry to leave the White House, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows assured aides that he would guarantee the administration complied with the regulations to leave the documents for the National Archive.
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They stressed, nonetheless, that Trump appeared more focused on "pushing through last-minute pardons" as he ignored the transition of power while repeating unfounded assertions that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
Although the White House Counsel's Office announced, it cautioned Meadows that the two dozen boxes needed to be turned in, which included document's marked "highly classified' and letters from Korean leader Kim Jong-un, they ended up in Mar-a-Lago instead.
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Under the Presidential Records Act, which governs the handling of records formed in the Oval Office, every document generated essentially belongs to taxpayers and has to be submitted to the National Archives.
Donald McGahn, Trump's first White House Counsel, had instituted a protocol for the handling of materials and had given presentations on the law to staff members, former officials told the Times.
They added that several conversations were had following the 2020 loss regarding sending someone to collect the documents that had been building up in Trump's estate.
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