Former President Donald J. Trump received a subpoena this spring seeking documents federal investigators believed he had failed to hand over earlier in the year when he returned boxes of materials he inappropriately brought with him as he left the White House. three people familiar with the matter said.
The subpoena’s existence helps flesh out the sequence of events that led to Monday’s search of Mr. Trump’s Florida home by FBI agents searching for classified material they believed to be there. could still be, even after efforts by the National Archives and the Department of Justice to ensure it had been returned.
The subpoena suggests the Justice Department tried other methods to account for the material before taking the politically explosive step of getting a search warrant and sending unannounced FBI agents to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump and a members-only club.