The Justice Department said Tuesday it had uncovered efforts to obstruct its investigation into the discovery of classified documents at Donald Trump’s Florida estate, saying “government records were likely concealed and removed” from a storage room even after the former president’s representatives had assured officials that they’d thoroughly searched the property. The FBI also seized 33 boxes containing more than 100 classified records during its Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago and found three classified documents stashed in office drawers, according to a filing that lays out the most detailed chronology to date of stained interactions between Justice Department officials and Trump representatives over the discovery of government secrets. Tuesday night’s filing included a photo showing the cover pages of a smattering of paperclip-bound classified documents — some marked as “TOP SECRET//SCI” with bright yellow borders, and one marked as “SECRET//SCI” with a rust-colored border — along with whited-out pages, splayed out on a carpet at Mar-a-Lago. Beside them sits a cardboard box filled with gold-framed pictures, including a Time Magazine cover. The filing offers yet another indication of the sheer volume of classified records retrieved from Mar-a-Lago. It shows how investigators conducting a criminal probe have focused not just on why the records were improperly stored there, but also on the question of whether the Trump team intentionally misled them about the continued, and unlawful, presence of government secrets. The document sheds new details on the events of this past May and June, when FBI and Justice Department officials issued a subpoena for the missing records and then visited a storage room at Mar-a-Lago that contained top-secret documents and other information. During that June visit, the document says, Trump’s lawyers told investigators that all the records that had come from the White House were stored in one location — a Mar-a-Lago storage room — and that “there were no other records stored in any private office space or other location at the Premises and that all available boxes were searched.” After that, though, the Justice Department “developed evidence that government records were likely concealed and removed from the Storage Room and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation.” In their search earlier this month, agents found classified documents both in the storage room as well as in the former president’s office, including three classified documents found not in boxes, but in office desks. The filing responds to a request from the Trump legal team for a special master to review the documents seized during the Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon is set to hear arguments on the matter. Trump’s lawyers last week asked for the appointment of a special master who’d be tasked with reviewing the records taken and setting aside documents protected by claims of legal privilege. Cannon on Saturday said it was her “preliminary intent” to appoint such a person but also gave the Justice Department an opportunity to respond. On Monday, the department said it had already completed its review of potentially privileged documents and identified a “limited set of materials that potentially contain attorney-client privileged information.” Read:Trump CFO’s plea deal could make him a prosecution witness In a separate development, the Trump legal team has grown with the addition of another attorney. Chris Kise, Florida’s former solicitor general, has joined the team of lawyers representing Trump, according to two people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to discuss the move by name and spoke on condition of anonymity. Kise did not return messages seeking comment.

Former Trump White House official Peter Navarro has been indicted on charges that he refused to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, but the Justice Department spared two other advisers, including the ex-president’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, from criminal prosecution. The department’s decision to not prosecute Meadows and Dan Scavino, another adviser to former President Donald Trump, was revealed in a letter sent Friday by a federal prosecutor to a lawyer for the House of Representatives. The move was reported hours after the indictment of Navarro and a subsequent, fiery court appearance in which he vowed to contest the contempt of Congress charges. The flurry of activity comes just days before the House committee leading the investigation into the riot at the Capitol holds a primetime hearing aimed at presenting the American public with evidence it has collected about how the assault unfolded. The split decisions show how the Justice Department has opted to evaluate on a case-by-case basis contempt referrals it has received from Congress rather than automatically pursue charges against each and every Trump aide who has resisted congressional subpoenas. The committee’s leaders called the decision to not prosecute Meadows and Scavino “puzzling.” In a statement late Friday, Reps. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said: “We hope the Department provides greater clarity on this matter. ... No one is above the law.” Though the Justice Department has referred multiple Trump aides for potential prosecution for refusal to cooperate, Navarro is only the second to face criminal charges, following the indictment last fall of former White House adviser Steve Bannon. READ: Kim Jong Un’s decade of rule: Purges, nukes, Trump diplomacy Navarro, 72, was charged with one contempt count for failing to appear for a deposition before the House committee and a second charge for failing to produce documents the committee requested. During an initial court appearance, he alleged that the Justice Department had committed “prosecutorial misconduct” and said he was told he could not contact anyone after being approached by an FBI agent at the airport Friday and put in handcuffs. He said he was arrested while trying to board a flight to Nashville, Tennessee for a television appearance. “Who are these people? This is not America,” Navarro said. “I was a distinguished public servant for four years!” Each charge carries a minimum sentence of a month in jail and a maximum of a year behind bars. The Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland had been facing pressure to move more quickly to decide whether to prosecute other Trump aides who have similarly defied subpoenas from the House panel. The New York Times first reported on the decision to not charge Meadows and Scavino. A person familiar with the decision who was not authorized to discuss it publicly confirmed it to The Associated Press on Friday. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, which made the decisions regarding each of the Trump aides, declined to comment Friday. Meadows, a close Trump adviser seen by House investigators as a vital witness to key events, initially cooperated with the committee, turning over more than 2,000 text messages sent and received in the days leading up to and of the attack. But in December, Meadows informed the committee that he would not sit for a deposition. Scavino was held in contempt in April after declining to cooperate with Congress. A lawyer for Meadows did not immediately return messages Friday night. Stan Brand, an attorney representing Scavino, said he had not yet received the letter from the U.S. attorney’s office, but he’d heard the news through a third party. “I’m grateful that the Justice Department exercised their discretion to decline prosecution,” Brand said. The indictment against Navarro alleges that when summoned to appear before the committee for a deposition earlier this year, he refused to do so and instead told the panel that because Trump had invoked executive privilege, “my hands are tied.” After committee staff told him they believed there were topics he could discuss without raising any executive privilege concerns, Navarro again refused, directing the committee to negotiate directly with lawyers for Trump, according to the indictment. The committee went ahead with its scheduled deposition on March 2, but Navarro did not attend. The indictment, dated Thursday, came days after Navarro revealed in a court filing that he also had been subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury this week as part of the Justice Department’s sprawling probe into the insurrection. The subpoena to Navarro, a trade adviser to Trump, was the first known instance of prosecutors seeking testimony from someone who worked in the Trump White House as they investigate the attack. “This was a preemptive strike by the prosecution against that lawsuit,” Navarro told Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui during his court appearance. “It simply flies in the face of good faith and due process.” Navarro made the case in his lawsuit Tuesday that the House select committee investigating the attack is unlawful and therefore a subpoena it issued to him in February is unenforceable under law. He sued members of the committee, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and the U.S. attorney in Washington, Matthew M. Graves, whose office is now handling the criminal case against him. In an interview with The Associated Press this week, Navarro said the goal of his lawsuit is much broader than the subpoenas themselves, part of an effort to have “the Supreme Court address a number of issues that have come with the weaponization of Congress’ investigatory powers” since Trump entered office. Members of the select committee sought testimony from Navarro about his efforts to help Trump overturn the 2020 presidential election, including a call trying to persuade state legislators to join their efforts. The former economics professor was one of the White House staffers who promoted Trump’s baseless claims of mass voter fraud. Trump, in turn, promoted a lengthy report Navarro released in December 2020, which Navarro falsely claimed contained evidence of the alleged misconduct and election fraud “more than sufficient” to swing victory to his former boss. Despite the opposition from several Trump allies, the Jan. 6 panel, comprised of seven Democrats and two Republicans, has managed to interview more than 1,000 witnesses about the insurrection in the past 11 months and is now preparing for a series of public hearings to begin next week. Lawmakers on the panel hope the half-dozen hearings will be a high-profile airing of the causes and consequences of the domestic attack on the U.S. government.

The Justice Department said Saturday that it no longer will secretly obtain reporters’ records during leak investigations, a policy shift that abandons a practice decried by news organizations and press freedom groups. The reversal follows a pledge last month by President Joe Biden, who said it was “simply, simply wrong” to seize journalists’ records and that he would not permit the Justice Department to continue the practice. Though Biden’s comments in an interview were not immediately accompanied by any change in policy, a pair of statements from the White House and Justice Department on Saturday signaled an official turnabout from an investigative tactic that has persisted for years. Read:Facebook suspends Trump for 2 years, then will reassess Democratic and Republican administrations alike have used subpoenas and court orders to obtain journalists’ records in an effort to identify sources who have revealed classified information. But the practice had received renewed scrutiny over the past month as Justice Department officials alerted reporters at three news organizations — The Washington Post, CNN and The New York Times — that their phone records had been obtained in the final year of the Trump administration. The latest revelation came Friday night when the Times reported the existence of a gag order that had barred the newspaper from revealing a secret court fight over efforts to obtain the email records of four reporters. That tussle had begun during the Trump administration but had persisted under the Biden Justice Department, which ultimately moved to withdraw the gag order. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement Saturday that no one at the White House was aware of the gag order until Friday night, but that more broadly, “the issuing of subpoenas for the records of reporters in leak investigations is not consistent with the President’s policy direction to the Department.” In a separate statement, Justice Department spokesman Anthony Coley said that “in a change to its longstanding practice,” the department “will not seek compulsory legal process in leak investigations to obtain source information from members of the news media doing their jobs.” He added: “The department strongly values a free press, protecting First Amendment values, and is committed to taking all appropriate steps to ensure the independence of journalists.” In ruling out “compulsory legal process” for reporters in leak investigations, the department also appeared to say that it would not force journalists to reveal in court the identity of their sources. Bruce D. Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said he welcomed the Justice Department’s policy change but that serious unanswered questions remain about what happened in each of these cases. Read:US to swiftly boost global vaccine sharing, Biden announces “To ensure it does not happen again, we look forward to pursuing additional policy reforms with the Biden administration to further safeguard these essential rights,” he said in a statement. The two newspapers whose reporters’ phone records had been secretly obtained also said more needed to be done. “This is a welcome step to protecting the ability of the press to provide the public with essential information about what their government is doing,” New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger said in a statement. “However, there is significantly more that needs to be done and we are still awaiting an explanation on why the Department of Justice moved so aggressively to seize journalists’ records.” Washington Post executive editor Sally Buzbee said the newspaper was calling on the Biden administration and Justice Department “to provide a full accounting of the chain of events in both administrations and to implement enduring protections to prevent any future recurrence.” The Justice Department statement did not say whether it would still conduct aggressive leak investigations without obtaining reporters’ records. It also did not define who exactly would be counted as a member of the media for the purposes of the policy and how broadly the protection would apply. Even so, it marked a startling reversal concerning a practice that has persisted across multiple presidential administrations. The Obama Justice Department, under then-Attorney General Eric Holder, alerted The Associated Press in 2013 that it had secretly obtained two months of phone records of reporters and editors in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into newsgathering activities. After blowback, Holder announced a revised set of guidelines for leak investigations, including requiring the authorization of the highest levels of the department before subpoenas for news media records could be issued. But the department preserved its prerogative to seize journalists’ records, and the recent disclosures to the news media organizations show that the practice continued in the Trump Justice Department as part of multiple investigations. Separately on Saturday, the Justice Department said it was withdrawing its subpoena that demanded USA Today provide information to identify readers of a story about a suspect in a child pornography case who fatally shot two FBI agents in February. The subpoena was issued in April but came to light this past week when USA Today and its parent company Gannett filed documents in federal court asking a judge to quash it. The subpoena sought the IP addresses and mobile phone identification information of readers who clicked on the article for a period of about 35 minutes on the day after the shooting. Read:US to impose tariffs over digital taxes, but action on hold for now The government hadn’t provided details about the case or why it was specifically interested in the readers who clicked on the USA Today story during that brief period. Officials had only said the subpoena was connected to an ongoing federal criminal investigation. But a federal prosecutor notified lawyers for USA Today on Saturday that the FBI was withdrawing its subpoena because authorities had been able to identify the subject of their investigation — described in an email as a “child sexual exploitation offender” — by “other means.” The prosecutor’s email was included in a court filing by Gannett.

A judge has halted the U.S. government's first execution of a female inmate in nearly seven decades, saying a court must first determine whether the Kansas woman who killed an expectant mother, cut the baby from her womb and then tried to pass off the newborn as her own is mentally competent.

A Justice Department investigation has found Yale University is illegally discriminating against Asian American and white applicants, in violation of federal civil rights law, officials said Thursday.

The four lawyers who prosecuted Roger Stone quit the case Tuesday after the Justice Department overruled them and said it would take the extraordinary step of lowering the amount of prison time it would seek for President Donald Trump's longtime ally and confidant.