NEW ORLEANS — So what do the National Archives have to do with the search at Mar-A-Lago?
The National Archives and Records Administration is the nation's record keeper.
It manages everything from the original U.S. Constitution to military records, to a huge online research database about ancestry and U.S. history.
It's also in charge of the official record of the President.
The Presidential Records Act of 1978, which followed President Richard Nixon's resignation, requires Presidents and Vice Presidents to file away memos, letters, notes, emails, faxes, phone records, texts, and other written communications.
A 2019 report by the Congressional Research Service details the process.
The administration is by law required to turn the files over to the Archivist of the United States when they leave the White House.
The Archivist's job is to make the former president's documents available to you as quickly and completely as possible.
In January, Archivists suspected Trump hadn't followed that law – and soon after, the Department of Justice recovered 15 boxes of materials from Mar-A-Lago that Trump should have turned over.
In this most recent search of Mar-A-Lago, the FBI was likely searching for more documents Trump didn't turn over, which legally belong to the National Archives.
If Trump is found to have violated the Presidential Records Act, he'd be the first former president to do so.
And there are penalties he could face for destroying White House records...penalties that Trump himself signed into law as felonies while he was in office.