Exclusive: Mark Meadows removed classified documents from the White House the last night of Donald Trump's presidency.

Cassidy Hutchinson testified that she witnessed Meadows removing the papers.

Former White House Chief of Staff during the Trump administration Mark Meadows speaks at FreedowmWorks headquarters on Nov. 14, 2022 in Washington, D.C.

Former president Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, removed more than a thousand pages of classified documents from the White House late at night on the final evening of Trump’s presidency. according to government records and interviews with several individuals with first-hand knowledge of the matter.

A former top aide to Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson, has told investigators that she witnessed Meadows removing the documents, according to previously unreported information contained in government records.

Meadows removed the records from the White House on the orders of Donald Trump, and occurred despite advice from White House attorneys that making public the records would circumvent the long established and official procedures in place for declassifying them.    

According to a previously unreported email from a top official of the National Archives to an aide to Trump, the Archives had concluded that many of the records removed from the White House to Meadows remained classified, despite efforts by Trump to declassify them at the time. Experts on government secrecy and declassification issues say that that and other information first reported in this article raises serious questions as to whether Meadows’ removal of the records violated federal law.

Foremost among the people with first-hand knowledge that Meadows removed the records from the White House is Hutchinson, the former aide to Meadows who gave riveting and meticulously detailed testimony to the House Jan. 6^th committee about her knowledge of events of that day, based on her extraordinary access and proximity to Trump and Meadows.

Hutchinson told investigators that she personally witnessed Meadows remove the papers from the White House and place them in the trunk of Meadows’ car to take home.

Hutchinson’s description of Meadows removal of the classified records is included in previously unreported details from an executive session interview she provided the House Jan. 6^th committee—and reported here for the first time.

The removal by Meadows of classified records from the White House appears to be separate from Trump’s removal from the White House of other classified documents to Mar-a-Largo, a matter long under investigation by special counsel Jack Smith and a federal grand jury.

The special counsel in recent days has reportedly informed Trump’s legal team that he and his prosecutors are close to completing their investigation, that Trump is a target of that inquiry, and a final charging decision in the case will be made soon.

Meadows has previously testified before the federal grand jury hearing evidence in the case and has been questioned by prosecutors working for the special counsel.  It is unclear whether he was asked about this previously unreported removal of classified records from the White House. Meadows’ attorney did not answer calls or return emails seeking comments for this story.

During my own months-long investigation, for my newsletter, Rule of Law-- four other former Trump administration officials have confirmed that Meadows removed the papers from the White House.

Three of them say that they have knowledge that then-President Trump directed Meadows to remove the papers from the White House and separately provide copies of some of them to two pro-Trump journalists.  Hutchinson also made corroborative claims that this was the case in her previously unreported comments to congressional investigators.

The records that Trump directed Meadows to remove from the White House were known by many of Trump senior staff as the “Russia papers”.

Both Trump and Meadows had hoped that the documents would corroborate their thus-far baseless claims and conspiracy theories that the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies had spied on his 2016 presidential campaign with the intent to thwart his election, and failing that, then conspired to drive him from office on false evidence.

People close to Meadows assert that he acted properly and legally while removing the records from the White House because they had been declassified by Trump the day before he left office, and once declassified, he could take a set for himself to do with whatever he pleased with them.

Although Trump did sign a memo ordering that the records be declassified, attorneys with the White House counsel’s office still concluded that they should not be released unless they went through the formal procedures and protocols that govern such declassifications, which was not done in this case.  Despite this, Meadows still removed the records from the White House.

I have spoken with eight former and current government officials, leading academic experts, and attorneys with long practical experience in government secrecy and classification issues, A small minority said that a president’s authority to declassify government records is so unfettered that Trump and Meadows could compellingly argue that they had a right to release the papers.

But most of the former officials and attorneys possessing expertise and vast experience with these matters, with whom I spoke, told me that they believed the records remained classified, and that Meadows acted improperly in removing them from the White House.

Richard Immerman, served as an Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence during the George W. Bush administration, and was the chairman of the State Department’s Historic Advisory Committee for more than a decade.  He told me that he believes that Meadows’ removal of the records to his home violated federal law. He further opined that the documents remain classified because of the slip-shod and incomplete effort to make them public.

“It is clear that both Trump and Meadows unequivocally violated both the spirit and the letter of the Presidential Records Act”—Trump by directing Meadows to remove the documents to his home in the first place, and Meadows by doing so, Immerman told me.

“The law is explicit,” Immerman added, “The documents can only be removed by a representative of the National Archives and Records Administration who takes custody of them. Meadows was not their designated representative.  Thus, he did not have any authority to remove them and his actions appear to be in direct violation of the law.”

And Meadow’s may face even more serious legal jeopardy if the documents indeed remained classified. Immerman and others say that because the documents did not go through the proscribed and proper declassification process, they have remained classified, according to Immerman and other experts.

For records to have been properly declassified, redactions must have first been made to them by the Justice Department, the FBI, and other agencies to protect classified information and to comply with the Privacy Act.  This was not done with the records that Meadows removed from the White House.

Immerman explains: “Their rationale and explanations as to why the documents are no longer classified is fatally flawed. A document is declassified at the time any material withheld from declassification is redacted—not pending decisions on those redactions. Further, DOJ reviews documents prior to presidential decisions on declassification, not after. DOJ had not yet allowed for such reviews.”

Brad Moss, an attorney specializing in national security law, adds: “An actual proper declassification involves a formal process that requires their ‘De-marking,’ the reversing of the markings on the records indicating they were classified. The proper De-marking of these documents would reflect the date of the declassification, the person who declassified them, and the authority on which they acted. That’s what the process requires.” Yet, that too was not done in this instance, and Moss says, another reason that they remained classified.

The National Archives and Records Association appears to agree that many of the records removed by Meadows were classified at the time: A July 14, 2022 email from Gary Stern, the general counsel of the Archives, to Kash Patel, Trump’s designated representative to the archives, noted that Trump had signed a declassification order for the papers on Jan. 19, 2021, on the same day that Meadows removed them from the White House. But in that same order, Stern pointed out, Trump agreed to wait until the FBI made final recommendations for redactions to the documents before they were formally declassified. Stern noted that until such time, “President Trump did not declassify the documents… in full”

Hutchinson told congressional investigators that not only did she see Meadows take the classified papers to his car, but she herself physically carried out some of them:

:”I remember he brought several [boxes of the documents] home on the night of the [January19^th, [2021, the last night of the Trump presidency,” Hutchinson told investigators, ‘1 even believe I put one or two of. them in his motorcade for him. I went down, and then| I started carrying two boxes out. And I think he put two in a box, and I was carrying the box because the box didn't have a lid on it, and he brought them home.”  

Hutchinson knew that the records were classified because of the markings on them, and also because she had also become familiar with the Russia papers while they had been circulating within the West Wing of the White House over the course of the previous two weeks.

Hutchinson further told investigators that that Meadows had intended to share a portion or all of the papers with two conservative journalists, Molly Hemingway of the Federalist, and ultraconservative commentator John Solomon:

‘I know that he was with going to give them to—he had the intention to give [them] to Mollie Hemingway and John Solomon that night, but I don’t know if they ever made the trip or if they ended up in their hands,” Hutchinson testified.

Indeed, earlier that same day, Solomon had gone to the White House, and met with then-president Trump at least twice.  While there, he was able to read through the Russia papers.

Later that same night, Solomon had in fact published a story based on one of the Russia papers, and posted a copy of the document online

Solomon insists that the document did not come from Meadows.

Rather Solomon claims, a Justice Department attorney, whom he neither ever met nor saw, and whose name he no longer recalls, delivered two documents from the Russia papers to the concierge’s desk in his office building.

In a “plain manila envelope,” he said, he found “about thirty to fifty pages of records” — many of these were about the infamous Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the so-called “Steele dossier;” while others concerned Stefan Halper, an FBI informant who assisted in the FBI’s investigation of Russia’s covert interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Accompanying the documents, Solomon told me, was a one-page note or letter from the unnamed Justice Department official, who Solomon says had sent over the documents.

Solomon insisted to me that he was certain that the documents were provided to him by the Justice Department official because a note written to him by the official, as well as the envelope that contained both the documents and the note within it, all bore the Justice Department insignia

Solomon said he could no longer recall the name of the Justice Department official. He said he no longer had a copy of the letter.  And he said he had not retained the envelope either.