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The letter also deepened understanding of the back-and-forth between the archives and Mr. Trump’s lawyers over how to handle retrieving the papers.

It described how archives officials had “ongoing communications” with Mr. Trump’s representatives last year about presidential records that were missing from their files. Those communications, Ms. Wall wrote, resulted in the archives retrieving 15 boxes of materials in January, some of them containing highly classified information marked top secret and others that were related to Special Access Programs.

But even after the archives retrieved the records, the letter said, Mr. Trump’s lawyers, in consultation with the White House Counsel’s Office, asked for time to determine whether — and how many of — the documents were protected by executive privilege, leading to negotiations that delayed the F.B.I., the Justice Department and the intelligence community from assessing the materials.

Those negotiations continued through April, even as Ms. Wall alerted Mr. Trump’s lawyers about the “urgency” of the agencies’ request to see the documents, which touched on “important national security interests,” the letter said. Ms. Wall ultimately rejected Mr. Trump’s claims of executive privilege after consulting with a top Justice Department official — a decision that Mr. Biden deferred to. As Ms. Wall wrote to Mr. Corcoran, before alerting him in May that the archives would soon hand the documents to the F.B.I., “The question in this case is not a close one.”

“The executive branch here is seeking access to records belonging to, and in the custody of, the federal government itself,” Ms. Wall wrote, “not only in order to investigate whether those records were handled in an unlawful manner but also, as the national security division explained, to ‘conduct an assessment of the potential damage resulting from the apparent manner in which these materials were stored and transported.”