From Jacqueline Alemany:

We have not figured that one out. But I can definitely say that Trump did not have “accomplices” at the Archives. Most of the archivists we have spoken with throughout the course of our investigation over the past seven months feel that Trump’s mishandling of documents is anathema to what they do, which is to preserve and secure documents and records.

Something a former acting Archivist Trudy Peterson told me in a conversation best captured the essence of NARA’s mission — and why Trump’s treatment of presidential records and classified materials is so problematic: “Without the preservation of the records of government, and without access to them, you can’t have an informed population, and without an informed population, you lack one of the basic tools to preserving democracy.”

There’s also a national security component to the discussion here, too. The government’s record keeping practices essentially provide a dashboard for the U.S. government to function and make decisions. Without some of these documents, the decision making processes could be impaired or incomplete. Especially when there is a transfer of power from one administration to the next, the new administration relies on having a complete set of materials and tools at their disposal to ensure continuity of U.S. policy.

Back to the question of how so many high level documents got to Mar-a-Lago… We do know that Trump flouted and rejected the record keeping practices of the White House office of records management (known as WHORM) for years. This is an office that sits inside the White House to keep track of the flurry of documents that live in the building. WHORM transfers most of the presidential records to the Archives during a transfer of power. While he was reminded by his White House counsel and top aides of the Presidential Records Act and was required by law to properly handle these records, along with classified information, he found ways around it. He would keep materials in his residence, fail to return items, and consistency carried around boxes that we were told he used as his unofficial record keeping system.

“Any documents that made it to the White House residence were these boxes Trump carried around with him,” Stephanie Grisham, a former senior White House staffer, told us for a piece we worked on last month. “Usually the body man would have brought them upstairs for Trump or someone from the outer-Oval at the end of the day. They would get handed off to the residence and just disappear.”