Donald Trump remains in contact with Kim Jong-un even as staff at the National Archives are in the process of obtaining “love letters” the two exchanged while he was president.
The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman revealed to Axios on Thursday that the ex-president has “told people that since leaving office, he has remained in contact with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un”.
“You know, what he says and what's actually happening are not always in concert ... but he has been telling people that he has maintained some kind of a either correspondence or discussion with Kim Jong-Un,” she added in an interview with CNN on Thursday.
The revelation is part of her upcoming book, Confidence Man, which explores the life and career of the former president from the perspective of Ms Haberman, a veteran Times reporter who has followed Mr Trump since his days in New York.
Correspondence with a foreign leader is not illegal, however, it raises the possibility of Logan Act violations. The Logan Act prevents any unauthorised private American citizen from negotiating with a hostile foreign government.
It comes as the National Archives is in the process of obtaining documents from Mr Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort that were improperly kept by the former president’s team long after he left the White House. By law, such records should have been turned over to the Archives after Mr Trump left the White House last January.
It was also reported by Ms Haberman in her book (and revealed in an interview with Axios) that the president’s team suspected he may have flushed some documents down the toilet (or tried to, at least) as well.
Among the documents being returned to the Archives are other letters between Mr Trump and Mr Kim, who developed an on-again-off-again relationship during Mr Trump’s tenure in the presidency and engaged in several rounds of high-level talks that ultimately failed to end in an agreement.
That failure is why the news of Mr Trump’s continued correspondence with North Korea’s leader is so surprising, given that he represents one of the most public failures of the Trump presidency.
The National Archives and the former president have become the source of a new wave of headlines this week as it has been revealed that the Trump team is still procuring boxes of documents for the agency including many that are described as torn up or otherwise personally destroyed by Mr Trump himself. The situation has led to the agency requesting that the Justice Department consider an investigation to determine if federal law was violated.
The Washington Post has previously reported that the former president, ever prone to bragging, personally described his correspondence with the North Korean leader as “love letters”, referring to the effusive praise Mr Kim would heap on him in his statements, and would often show the letters to visiting guests.
