Trump's legal team facing contempt charges over Mar-a-Lago delays

The US Department of Justice has asked a judge to hold Donald Trump's office in contempt, over their purported failure to return all sensitive documents in the former president's possession.

Federal prosecutors have asked for the contempt charge after months of obfuscation from Trump's legal team, the Washington Post reported.

So far the judge, Beryl Howell of the DC District, has not issued a ruling over the request.

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Trump's office was handed a subpoena in May demanding the return of all classified documents.

This led to an FBI raid on Trump's Florida country club Mar-a-Lago, where at least 325 classified documents were recovered.

All presidential records must be handed over to the National Archive when a president leaves office, but Trump has not complied with the law.

Prosecutors have pushed the former president's legal team to appoint a custodian of records, who could swear, under penalty of perjury, that all documents have been returned.

So far none of Trump's lawyers have been willing to put their name to such a statement.

Trump has admitted the documents were in his possession, after taking umbrage at the inference they had been lying on the floor.

"There seems to be confusion as to the 'picture' where documents were sloppily thrown on the floor and then released photographically for the world to see, as if that's what the FBI found when they broke into my home. Wrong!" he wrote on his social media site earlier this year.

"They took them out of cartons and spread them around on the carpet, making it look like a big 'find' for them.

"They dropped them, not me."

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Yesterday it was revealed two more classified documents were found at a storage facility in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Whether Trump himself is indicted over the mishandling of classified documents is up to special counsel Jack Smith.

Smith, a veteran prosecutor, was tapped by Attorney-General Merrick Garland to be an independent investigator at the Department of Justice.

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Smith will recommend to Garland whether to press charges against Trump for this potential crime, among several others being investigated.

Smith has also issued subpoenas for records this week from three states where Trump sought to overturn the 2020 election results.

Trump launched another bid for the presidency last month, but has spent nearly all of his time since in Mar-a-Lago.

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