The top attorney at the National Archives emailed former White House lawyers in May 2021 alerting them that the administration had failed to turn over correspondence between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg.

"There are also now certain paper/textual records that we cannot account for,” wrote Gary Stern, general counsel for the National Archives and Records Administration, wrote in a May 2021 email sent to Patrick Philbin, the former deputy White House counsel, his deputy, Scott Gast, and a Trump lawyer, Mike Purpura.

Stern also points out that Trump failed to turn over a letter that former President Barack Obama left for Trump during the transition, a longstanding tradition between US presidents.