Today's Quote

I know just enough about myself to know I cannot settle for one of those simplifications which indignant people seize upon to make understandable a world too complex for their comprehension. Astrology, health food, flag waving, bible thumping, Zen, nudism, nihilism - all of these are grotesque simplifications which small dreary people adopt in the hope of thereby finding The Answer, because the concept that maybe there is no answer, never has been, never will be, terrifies them.

--John D MacDonald - A Deadly Shade Of Gold

Waste Fraud & Abuse

Here's the cautionary tale that always goes with big attempts to do big things.

There's a shitload of problems with the programs intended to help the people who really need - and really deserve - help.

But instead of addressing the problems created by the shitty behavior of bad actors who always jump in looking for a quick score at other people's expense, we're bound to hear that somehow that shitty behavior is proof that we should never even try to help people - that we should just leave it all to the pros - the guys who have that shitty behavior down to a science, and can pull it off better cuz they've got dark money sponsorship and political cover from the usual rent-seeking plutocrats.

And we'll be right back to groveling for a few crumbs as we slouch towards authoritarian rule.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Millions in covid aid went to retrain veterans. Only 397 landed jobs.
Nearly $400 million went to a veteran retraining program as part of the American Rescue Plan

The offer to military veterans left unemployed by the coronavirus pandemic was tantalizing: A year of online courses courtesy of the federal government. Graduates would be set up for good jobs in high-demand fields from app development to graphic design.

“I jumped at it,” said Jacqueline Culbreth, 61, an Air Force veteran laid off in 2020 from her job as a construction estimator in Orlando. “I was looking forward basically to upping my earning power.”

But more than a year after enrolling at the Chicago-based Future Tech Career Institute, Culbreth is no closer to her goal of landing a job in cloud computing. Like many former service members enrolled at the for-profit trade school under a pandemic relief program run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, she soon found herself immersed in discouraging chaos.

Schedules were disorganized and courses did not follow a set syllabus. School-provided laptops couldn’t run critical software. And during long stretches of scheduled class time, students were left without instruction, according to interviews with Culbreth and 10 other veterans who attended the school.

In February, VA cut off tuition payments to Future Tech, leaving Culbreth and more than 300 other veterans in the lurch.

The disarray at Future Tech is the most painful example of broader problems with the $386 million Veteran Rapid Retraining Assistance Program, or VRRAP. Many schools proved unable to attract students or deliver promised services. In addition to Future Tech, nearly 90 schools have had their approvals yanked, according to VA officials, including several that were actively serving about 100 veterans. Some schools were cut off amid allegations of predatory practices, while others simply went out of business.

As of Aug. 1, only about 6,800 veterans had enrolled in the program, far fewer than the 17,250 Congress created it to serve, the agency said; just 397 had landed new jobs.
The

The story of VRRAP illustrates Washington’s often losing battle to effectively spend the torrent of cash Congress threw at the coronavirus pandemic starting in March 2020. In all, lawmakers approved more than $5 trillion for covid relief, an unprecedented wave of emergency loans, grants and other assistance intended to fight the virus and pull America out of its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. But haste and carelessness in crafting the aid created a wellspring for fraud and waste — a mess that hundreds of federal investigators are still trying to clean up.

In VRRAP’s case, Congress bungled both the program’s design and its timing, critics said, diminishing the likelihood of attracting students. As of last week, roughly half the money had been spent, leaving VA on track to return tens of millions of dollars to the U.S. Treasury when the program expires in December.

Lawmakers didn’t address VA’s long struggle to police for-profit schools that engage in deceptive practices, as they set up a program that attracted many for-profit entities. Future Tech had been barred from receiving VA tuition payments for several courses in 2012 after Illinois officials concluded that the school — then doing business under a different name — had submitted false reports and misled veterans. The school regained its eligibility in 2017, Future Tech said in a statement. Under VRRAP, it charged VA more than $25,000 per student per year, according to a tuition statement seen by The Post — just under the federal cap of $26,000 and about $7,000 higher than other computer boot camps approved by the program.

Future Tech said the school saw “tremendous success” with the pandemic program. The company described its earlier loss of eligibility for VA funding as the result of “minor” violations that have since been resolved. Its tuition and fees for VRRAP were appropriate, the statement said, for a year-long, 18 hour-per-week program that includes a laptop, practice exams and vouchers to take certification exams.

Future Tech acknowledged that illness and supply-chain snarls caused by the pandemic disrupted some courses for some students, but said the impacts were limited. It castigated Illinois officials for moving too hastily to shut off VRRAP funds.

“This decision disrupted the training for more than 300 veterans when just a handful had issues that could and should have been dealt with individually,” the company said. “We will never know what could have been achieved.”

‘We wanted to help them’

The troubles with VRRAP were achingly predictable: A similar program rolled out in 2012 — the Veterans Retraining Assistance Program, or VRAP — also failed to attract students and was widely regarded as a flop. Nonetheless, veterans advocates began pushing for another education benefit after the pandemic plunged the economy into free-fall, leaving many veterans unemployed.

Lawmakers did not include the program in the first covid aid package, the $2-trillion Cares Act signed by President Donald Trump. Instead, they waited until 2021, adding it to the $1.9-trillion American Rescue Plan Act signed by President Biden.

By then, VRRAP was a solution to a problem that no longer existed. At the height of the pandemic in 2020, veterans experienced a jobless rate of 6.5 percent, compared with 8 percent for nonveterans. By 2021, the unemployment rate among veterans had fallen to 4.4 percent. Last month, it stood at 2.7 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, hovering near record lows.

“We wanted this done sooner than it actually got passed. Now you have people saying, ‘Is it really needed? No one is using it,’ ” said Tom Porter, executive vice president for government relations for the nonpartisan Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, which was involved in crafting the legislation.

James Ruhlman, VA’s deputy director for program management for education, acknowledged that the agency had a limited view of veteran unemployment during the pandemic. He said that even the Labor Department struggled to understand employment trends.

VA officials had other concerns about the program, which also provided students with a substantial monthly housing allowance, current and former agency officials said. In recent years, a swell of soldiers returning from the post-Sept. 11 conflicts have gotten an education using GI Bill benefits, and hundreds of schools have been vetted by state officials. But the VA inspector general also issued repeated warnings about duplications, delays and “financial risks” from the agency’s reliance on for-profit schools, including an emergency warning in 2018 that many states were failing to properly monitor the schools and getting poor oversight from VA.

To avoid repeating that troubled history, the agency structured tuition payments to be spread out, so the final check of three would be sent only after a student finds a job. But multiple schools with spotty track records that had qualified for other education programs got the green light to serve VRRAP students.

Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) publicized the Future Tech case after officials in Illinois investigated student complaints. “I don’t know if they did their due diligence,” he said of VA. “For-profit schools by and large are a fraud on the public, and the victims in this case are veterans, thinking that they were taking advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic opportunity.”

Asked about the timing of the program, Durbin said lawmakers were rushing to respond to an emergency. “We didn’t know if this pandemic was going to last two months or two years or longer,” the senator said. “We saw some very vulnerable people who had served our country. We wanted to help them. We just went to the wrong place.”

There were other issues. The narrowly drawn legislation limited tuition support to veterans who were not eligible for other educational benefits and were not receiving unemployment insurance or enrolled in any other federal or state jobs program — which risked leaving very few eligible applicants.

Meanwhile, the Veterans Benefits Administration, which oversees employment and training programs, did little to market the initiative, according to congressional aides and veterans’ advocates.

“You would think something like that would be put out,” said Kevin Keller, an official with the Illinois Marine Corps League and other state veterans groups. “But the word never got out from VA.”

Some school administrators described a labyrinth of red tape as they tried to get paid or get questions answered, with emails languishing for months in no-reply inboxes at VA.

“Collectively, we feel like it was too big of a program [for VA] to quickly launch without understanding the space they were entering into,” said Alicia Boddy, chief operations and development officer at Code Platoon, a Chicago computer coding boot camp. She meets monthly with a group of other school administrators.

“Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong,” Boddy said.

A study in chaos

Future Tech grabbed an opportunity. Biden’s signature on the legislation was barely dry when the school began trumpeting the new benefit to veterans. In one May 2021 email, it advertised a “12-month program to fully utilize the 12 months of eligibility awarded you by VA.”

Opened in 2006 as the Computer Training Institute of Chicago, Future Tech now operates from a high-rise office building across Michigan Avenue from the Art Institute of Chicago. In a 2012 interview with one of its alumni, then the host of a local TV show on technology, program director Paul Johnson touted the school’s track record of connecting students with high-paying jobs.

“We network with the VA, we network with a number of different corporate organizations,” Johnson said.

In 2012, the school received approval from Illinois officials to provide VA-funded courses to veterans. (VA authorizes officials in each state to vet local educational institutions.) Within 10 months, however, the state had stripped Future Tech’s eligibility for federal funding for the courses after concluding that administrators were submitting false reports and misleading veterans about costs.

Details of that decision were revealed after Johnson sued VA in federal court in 2013; the lawsuit was dismissed. In a statement, Future Tech said the 2012 violation “was regarding a statement on our website. The other violations mentioned were also minor. FTCI has added several new leaders and staff and strengthened our oversight” and regained VA eligibility in 2017.

As the pandemic deepened, the school switched to an online format. Last year, Johnson changed its name to Future Tech Career Institute, according to Illinois business records, and began welcoming VRRAP students.

It didn’t take long for dissatisfaction to settle in. “People were complaining to VA: ‘Hey they’re not teaching us,’” Culbreth recalled.

Promised a year of comprehensive training, many students said they found only disorganization as swelling enrollment outpaced instructors and administrative support.

“We literally didn’t know what class we were taking next,” said one veteran, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to be publicly associated with the school.

Tyra White, a former Air Force police officer now living in New Orleans, enrolled in Future Tech in June 2021 to study graphic design. She said students were continually added to her course on Adobe Creative Suite with no notice, taking the instructor off guard. Two other students in the course confirmed her account.

“We’d be in the middle of something, maybe in the third week of the program, and then someone would enter the program brand new and then just be thrown into the third week’s content,” White recalled. The instructor “would have to teach them on the break everything that was presented to us on week one.”

Two days a week, students were assigned to “lab time,” White said, when they were supposed to work independently with access to instructors to ask questions. But instructors were usually teaching an entirely different course and therefore unavailable, she said.

“The entire atmosphere while we were there was totally discouraging,” White said. “It was so disorganized.”

Even the promised laptops were a problem: In an email sent to Johnson that was reviewed by The Post, a student complained that some students had yet to receive their computers weeks into classes, while others had been given machines with insufficient memory.

In some cases, the school did not give students access to basic software programs, said Kenneth Bainey, a retired information technology professional based in Canada who teaches project management part-time at Future Tech.

“There were terrible issues with administration,” Bainey said. Textbooks “took a month to get,” he said, adding that he was forced to search for some chapters online.

Last week, Bainey placed blame on the students, saying some veterans were “terribly destructive.”

“They came to class, never did any assignments and expected certification,” he said. “We had to get rid of them, and then they complained.”

Future Tech blamed the chaos on the pandemic. “We did have some staffing challenges and online challenges — COVID made the world very difficult for all,” its statement said.

While illness caused staffing shortages that forced instructors to take on extra classes, this was done “for the shortest time possible,” the company said. Book delays were “isolated cases, not the norm.” Like the problems with laptops, delays were caused by “supply chain issues we are all sadly familiar with.”

Under VRRAP’s strict rules, students couldn’t switch schools without losing benefits. Many veterans complained bitterly to VA — and to Johnson, according to emails reviewed by The Post. By February, with rumors spreading that Future Tech might close, Johnson admonished students not to gossip, saying it could trigger “anxiety, PTSD or trauma.”

“Everything will work out,” he wrote in an email reviewed by The Post. “All of you will be fine.”

‘I’m so disappointed’

Three-and-a-half weeks later, VA cut off payments to Future Tech.

A VA claims processor in Muskogee, Okla., had become suspicious after spotting a tenfold spike in enrollment in December 2021, VA officials said. Years of experience suggested that exploding enrollment at a for-profit school could be a sign of trouble.

VA notified the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs, which found serious problems at Future Tech, including missing instructors, changing course lengths, students forced to take night courses when they had requested a day schedule, instructors who lacked certifications, “substantial misrepresentations” and sloppy record-keeping, according to a letter sent to Johnson in February.

For Future Tech students, the decision abruptly cut off not only tuition payments but also a housing allowance of more than $2,000 a month. Culbreth said she briefly was forced to live out of her car and in a homeless shelter.

Frustrated by the lack of instruction, Culbreth had joined other students in an independent study group and managed to earn specialized certification in cloud web services. But she had hoped to earn certification in three or four other areas. Today, she works as a project coordinator for a tech company, a less technical position that doesn’t pay enough to rent her own apartment, she said.

“I’m drowning here,” said Culbreth, who has been staying with a friend. “I’m so disappointed. I would have finished. I would have gotten my certifications. I wouldn’t have let anything stop me.”

The program’s disappointing showing has prompted two congressional hearings. In February, Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.), chairman of a House subcommittee focused on economic opportunity for veterans, pressed for data on education quality at for-profit schools and asked how VA defines “successful employment.” Program integration officer Ricardo DaSilva conceded that the agency does not study job retention.

In May, a senior VA Education Service official objected to Levin’s proposal to boost enrollment by adding four-year colleges to VRRAP’s roster of schools, saying the change would cause “new administrative burdens” months before the program expires. Levin fired back: “The status quo is entirely unacceptable.”

A month later, Congress passed legislation authorizing VA to recover at least $4.2 million in tuition and fees from schools whose approvals were pulled, including Future Tech. Nothing has yet been recovered, and Ruhlman said he is not confident anything will be.

“I wouldn’t say it will be easy to get it back,” he said.

Asked about the program’s failures, Ruhlman said “there are hurdles and a number of administrative problems to be solved in the rollout of any federal program.” He noted that VRRAP was created “in a very fairly short period of time.”

In July, Future Tech changed its name yet again: It is now the Institute of Business and Technology Careers, according to Illinois business records. The school said it has been told by state officials that it could reapply for future VA programs.

Ruhlman predicted VA officials would “put that application … under extreme scrutiny.”

“Given what has happened,” he said, “I would say that the bar would be fairly high.”

Today's Tweet

Canceling student loan debt? Are you shittin me?? pic.twitter.com/bKh45qntS0

— Corey Ryan Forrester First of His Name (@CoreyRForrester) August 24, 2022

Try Helping Instead

"I worked twenty-nine hours a day at fourteen jobs, and walked 11 miles to class in the snow with nothing on my feet but Wonder Bread bags - in the dark and uphill and blah blah fucking blah."

Cliché du jour

If you had a really shitty life, and now you think everybody else should have a really shitty life, cuz hey - you did, and you turned out OK, here's the thing: you did not turn out OK.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Opinion
Stop improving things right now! Everyone must suffer as I did!

DISGUSTING! AWFUL! I have just received word that life is getting marginally better for some people, and I am white-hot with fury! This is the worst thing that could possibly happen! I did not suffer and strive and work my fingers to the bone so that anybody else could have a life that does not involve suffering and striving and the working of fingers to the bone. I demand to see only bones and no fingers!

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night thrashing because I have had the nightmare again, the nightmare in which someone else is being spared a small hint of the suffering I endured. The world should not get better! The world should get worse along with me and perish along with me.

Every time anyone’s life improves at all, I personally am insulted. Any time anyone devises a labor-saving device, or passes some kind of weak, soft-hearted law that forecloses the opportunity for a new generation of children to lose fingers in dangerous machinery, I gnash my teeth. This is an affront to everyone who struggled so mightily. To avoid affronting them, we must keep everything just as bad as ever. Put those fingers back into the machines, or our suffering will have been in vain.

When I see unleaded paint or un-asbestosed homes, I froth at the mouth and start stomping up and down like Rumpelstiltskin. And who are we to think we deserve better than to die of sepsis? Why shouldn’t smallpox be out in the world for us as it once was? Are we too good for scurvy, now? Our great-grandparents made do without penicillin, did they not?

Who qualifies for Biden’s plan to cancel $10,000 in student debt?

What a fallen, broken world we live in. The audacity of people trying to eat food not contaminated by waste, or increase the number of rhinos in the wild — they had better not! Clean the air? YOU STOP THAT RIGHT NOW. Inhaling thick lungfuls of coal smoke was miserable for me, and it will be miserable for you. Put the cockroaches back into the kitchen, please, and lye back into the meat!

I look down at the face of my sleeping child and I vow: If this baby’s life is even one particle easier than mine was, I will burn this whole place down!

John Adams wrote that “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.”

This just shows you what a fool John Adams was! No one should get to study Painting, Poetry or Musick EVER, and if they do, they should pay for it their entire lives.

I am not opposed to this student loan forgiveness plan because I fear it won’t ease the suffering of millions; I am opposed to it because I fear that it will.

I fought uphill battles and squinted into the night and toiled and burdened myself in the hope that my children, one day, would also get to work exactly that hard, if not harder, and suffer at least as much as I did, and have, if the Lord allows, lives worse than mine. God, please make their lives worse!

Overheard

Republicans want you to know

that they're very upset

about being judged

by the content of their character

instead of the color of their skin.

Podcast

Leigh McGowan - Politics Girl - with Teri Kanefield

Why did he want it released when it makes him look bad?
Trump always makes things worse for Trump (thank you, Bob Cesca)
..."because no publicity is bad publicity" is his mantra. Exactly what Ms Kanefield said - to him, it's just a matter of keeping himself at the center of the conversation. The consequences don't matter because most people won't remember any of it 3 days from now anyway, and by then, he'll have given us 5 other things to worry about.

 

It's episodic. He puts on his little pageant, intended to create confusion, and the reaction to it (good or bad) helps him find an opportunity to cash in on whatever comes of it, which in turn drives the script for the next episode.

"In confusion there is opportunity" --Tony Curtis as Lt Holden, Operation Petticoat - 1959

...or maybe it was Sun Tzu - ca 6th Century BCE(?)

it's not rocket surgery

if you want a more democratic government

you have to elect more democrats

This One Guy

I won't say he gets it, because he didn't commit to voting against these bills, or trying to amend existing laws - he just lodged his complaints. And while that's a start - a pretty good start considering what some of these yahoos are doing and saying - it's one guy in one small-ish state.

But it's a bit of a start.

Now This News - GOP State Rep Neal Collins

A Little Privacy Please

I don't know how you read some amendments to the US Constitution and not come away with the idea that privacy is at the center of the debate over what rights we do and don't have here in USAmerica Inc.

A1: My private thoughts are my own and the government can go suck eggs.

A3: I get to decide who does and who doesn't stay in my own private housing.

A4: My person and my place and my stuff are private and nobody else's business.

A5: I'll keep my answers to myself so the government can't use my words against me.

A6: Government can't strip me of my privacy without due process.

A10: Information about me belongs to me.

NYT - Opinion by Alex Kingsbury: (pay wall)

We’re About to Find Out What Happens When Privacy Is All but Gone

Whenever I see one of those billboards that read: “Privacy. That’s iPhone,” I’m overcome by the urge to cast my own iPhone into a river. Of lava.

That’s not because the iPhone is any better or worse than other smartphones when it comes to digital privacy. (I’d take an iPhone over an Android phone in a second; I enjoy the illusion of control over my digital life as much as the next person.)

What’s infuriating is the idea that carrying around the most sophisticated tracking and monitoring device ever forged by the hand of man is consistent with any understanding of privacy. It’s not. At least not with any conception of privacy our species had pre-iPhone.

Reconciling the idea of privacy with our digital world demands embracing a profound cognitive dissonance. To exist in 2022 is to be surveilled, tracked, tagged and monitored — most often for profit. Short of going off the grid, there’s no way around it.

Consider just last week: Apple released a surprise software update for its iPhones, iPads and Macs meant to remove vulnerabilities the company says may have been exploited by sophisticated hackers. The week before that, a former Google engineer discovered that Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, was using a piece of code to track users of the Facebook and Instagram apps across the internet without their knowledge. In Greece, the prime minister and his government have been consumed by a widening scandal in which they are accused of spying on the smartphones of an opposition leader and a journalist.

And this month Amazon announced that it was creating a show called “Ring Nation” — a sort of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” made up of footage recorded by the company’s Ring doorbells. These video doorbells, sold by Amazon and other companies, are now watching millions of American homes, and they are often used by police departments as, effectively, surveillance networks. All in the name of fighting crime, of course.

Step back, and what we’re looking at is a world where privacy simply doesn’t exist anymore. Instead of talking about old notions of privacy, and how to defend or get back to that ideal state, we should start talking about what comes next.

That reality is becoming clearer to Americans after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, which eliminated the federal right to abortion. They now understand that their phone location data, internet searches and purchase history are all fair game for the police — especially in states that do not protect abortion rights, and where women can be hunted down for their health care choices. If the courts once defended the right to have an abortion as part of a broader right to privacy, by vaporizing that right, the Roberts court shattered many of Americans’ conceptions of privacy as well.

In 2019, Times Opinion investigated the location tracking industry. Whistleblowers gave us a data set that included millions of pings from individual cellphones around daily commutes, churches and mosques, abortion clinics, the Pentagon, even the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency. “If the government ordered Americans to continuously provide such precise, real-time information about themselves, there would be a revolt,” the editorial board wrote.

Yet despite years of talk, Congress is no closer to passing robust privacy legislation than it was two decades ago when the idea first came up. Even their baby steps aren’t encouraging. Two bills in the current session aim to roll back some of this mass monitoring around abortion and reproductive health in particular, although neither one is likely to pass.

One, the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, would prevent law enforcement and government agencies from purchasing location data and other sensitive information from data brokers. Another, the My Body, My Data Act, would forbid tech companies to keep, use or share some personal health information absent written consent. Neither bill would prevent police officers with a court order from getting such information.

Some tech companies, like Google, have announced voluntary measures to protect some user data around reproductive health care. A group of hundreds of Google employees is circulating a petition to strengthen privacy protections for users who look for information about abortion through its search engine.

But even if those bills pass and some tech companies take more steps, there are simply too many tech companies, government entities, data brokers, internet service providers and others tracking everything we do.

Protecting digital privacy is not in the interest of the government, and voters don’t seem to care much about privacy at all. Nor is it in the interest of tech companies, which sell user private data for a profit to advertisers. There are too many cameras, cell towers and inscrutable artificial intelligence engines in operation to live an unobserved life.

For years, privacy advocates, who foresaw the contours of the surveilled world we now live in, warned that privacy was a necessary prerequisite for democracy, human rights and a flourishing of the human spirit. We’re about to find out what happens when that privacy has all but vanished.

Today's Tweet

Vote yourself a little freedom.

Women make over 50% of the population. It’s time we vote in our own best interest. pic.twitter.com/9mkumqbS7r

— Tamie Wilson (D) for US Congress (OH-4) (@TamieUSCongress) August 23, 2022

Today's Holy Fuck

It turns out Trump had taken hundreds of classified documents on his way out of the White House.

The 'why' question has not yet been fully satisfied, except in the "L'tat c'est moi" sense as articulated by Maggie Haberman last week.

And maybe it's just that simple - "Try to resist attributing to malice that which can be explained by incompetence" - but this is Trump, so there's always a few nefarious angles to consider.

• Maybe he had to grab those documents to satisfy demands from - oh, I don't know, Putin?
• Maybe he decided he might be able to use them against someone else?
• Maybe he thought he could use them as leverage against being brought up on charges
• Maybe it's strictly commercial - he thought the documents would make for some good auction material?

Who knows?

 

"No documentation has come to light confirming that Mr. Trump declassified the material, and the potential crimes cited by the Justice Department in seeking the search warrant for Mar-a-Lago would not hinge on the classification status of the documents."

NYT: (pay wall)

Trump Had More Than 300 Classified Documents at Mar-a-Lago

The National Archives found more than 150 sensitive documents when it got a first batch of material from the former president in January, helping to explain the Justice Department’s urgent response.

The initial batch of documents retrieved by the National Archives from former President Donald J. Trump in January included more than 150 marked as classified, a number that ignited intense concern at the Justice Department and helped trigger the criminal investigation that led F.B.I. agents to swoop into Mar-a-Lago this month seeking to recover more, multiple people briefed on the matter said.

In total, the government has recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Mr. Trump since he left office, the people said: that first batch of documents returned in January, another set provided by Mr. Trump’s aides to the Justice Department in June and the material seized by the F.B.I. in the search this month.

The previously unreported volume of the sensitive material found in the former president’s possession in January helps explain why the Justice Department moved so urgently to hunt down any further classified materials he might have.

And the extent to which such a large number of highly sensitive documents remained at Mar-a-Lago for months, even as the department sought the return of all material that should have been left in government custody when Mr. Trump left office, suggested to officials that the former president or his aides had been cavalier in handling it, not fully forthcoming with investigators, or both.

The specific nature of the sensitive material that Mr. Trump took from the White House remains unclear. But the 15 boxes Mr. Trump turned over to the archives in January, nearly a year after he left office, included documents from the C.I.A., the National Security Agency and the F.B.I. spanning a variety of topics of national security interest, a person briefed on the matter said.

Mr. Trump went through the boxes himself in late 2021, according to multiple people briefed on his efforts, before turning them over.

The highly sensitive nature of some of the material in the boxes prompted archives officials to refer the matter to the Justice Department, which within months had convened a grand jury investigation.

Aides to Mr. Trump turned over a few dozen additional sensitive documents during a visit to Mar-a-Lago by Justice Department officials in early June. At the conclusion of the search this month, officials left with 26 boxes, including 11 sets of material marked as classified, comprising scores of additional documents. One set had the highest level of classification, top secret/sensitive compartmented information.

The Justice Department investigation is continuing, suggesting that officials are not certain whether they have recovered all the presidential records that Mr. Trump took with him from the White House.

Even after the extraordinary decision by the F.B.I. to execute a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, investigators have sought additional surveillance footage from the club, people familiar with the matter said.

More Coverage of the F.B.I. Search of Trump’s Home

• A Chaotic Exit: Former President Donald J. Trump’s unwillingness to let go of power helped lead to the failure to turn over government documents in his final days in office.
• Trump-F.B.I. Conflict: The Mar-a-Lago search was a dramatic moment after years of tumult between Mr. Trump and the nation’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
• Shifting Explanations: Mr. Trump and his allies have given often conflicting defenses of his retention of classified documents without addressing why he had kept them.
• Trump’s Reaction: In the wake of the search, Mr. Trump has accused the nation’s justice system of being exactly what he tried to turn it into: a political weapon for a president.

It was the second such demand for the club’s security tapes, said the people familiar with the matter, and underscored that authorities are still scrutinizing how the classified documents were handled by Mr. Trump and his staff before the search.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. declined to comment.

Mr. Trump’s allies insist that the president had a “standing order” to declassify material that left the Oval Office for the White House residence, and have claimed that the General Services Administration, not Mr. Trump’s staff, packed the boxes with the documents.

No documentation has come to light confirming that Mr. Trump declassified the material, and the potential crimes cited by the Justice Department in seeking the search warrant for Mar-a-Lago would not hinge on the classification status of the documents.

National Archives officials spent much of 2021 trying to get back material from Mr. Trump, after learning that roughly two dozen boxes of presidential records material had been lingering in the White House residence for several months. Under the Presidential Records Act, all official material remains government property and has to be provided to the archives at the end of a president’s term.

Among the items they knew were missing were Mr. Trump’s original letters from the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, and the note that President Barack Obama had left Mr. Trump before he left office.

Two former White House officials, who had been designated as among Mr. Trump’s representatives with the archives, received calls and tried to facilitate the documents’ return.

Mr. Trump resisted those calls, describing the boxes of documents as “mine,” according to three advisers familiar with his comments.

Soon after beginning their investigation early this year, Justice Department officials came to believe there were additional classified documents that they needed to collect. In May, after conducting a series of witness interviews, the department issued a subpoena for the return of remaining classified material, according to people familiar with the episode.

On June 3, Jay Bratt, the chief of the counterespionage section of the national security division of the Justice Department, went to Mar-a-Lago to meet with two of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb, and retrieve any remaining classified material to satisfy the subpoena. Mr. Corcoran went through the boxes himself to identify classified material beforehand, according to two people familiar with his efforts.

Mr. Corcoran showed Mr. Bratt the basement storage room where, he said, the remaining material had been kept.

Mr. Trump briefly came to see the investigators during the visit.

Mr. Bratt and the agents who joined him were given a sheaf of classified material, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Mr. Corcoran then drafted a statement, which Ms. Bobb, who is said to be the custodian of the documents, signed. It asserted that, to the best of her knowledge, all classified material that was there had been returned, according to two people familiar with the statement.

Mr. Corcoran did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Ms. Bobb did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Soon after that visit, investigators, who were interviewing several people in Mr. Trump’s circle about the documents, came to believe that there were other presidential records that had not been turned over, according to the people familiar with the matter.

On June 22, the Justice Department subpoenaed the Trump Organization for Mar-a-Lago’s security footage, which included a well-trafficked hallway outside the storage area, the people said.

The club had surveillance footage going back 60 days for some areas of the property, stretching back to late April of this year.

While much of the footage showed hours of club employees walking through the busy corridor, some of it raised concerns for investigators, according to people familiar with the matter. It revealed people moving boxes in and out, and in some cases, appearing to change the containers some documents were held in. The footage also showed other parts of the property.

In seeking a second round of security footage, the Justice Department wants to review tapes for the weeks leading up to the Aug. 8 search.

Federal officials have indicated that their initial goal has been to secure any classified documents Mr. Trump was holding at Mar-a-Lago, a pay-for-membership club where there is little control over who comes in as guests. It remains to be seen whether anyone will face criminal charges stemming from the investigation.

The combination of witness interviews and the initial security footage led Justice Department officials to begin drafting a request for a search warrant, the people familiar with the matter said.

The F.B.I. agents who conducted the search found the additional documents in the storage area in the basement of Mar-a-Lago, as well as in a container in a closet in Mr. Trump’s office, the people said.

Mr. Trump’s allies have attacked the law enforcement agencies, accusing the investigators of being partisan.

The intense public interest has now spurred a legal fight to see the search warrant’s underlying affidavit. On Monday, a federal magistrate issued a formal order directing the Justice Department to send him under seal proposed redactions to the affidavit underlying the warrant used to search Mar-a-Lago by Thursday, accompanied by a memo explaining its justifications.

In the order, the judge, Bruce E. Reinhart, said he was inclined to release portions of the sealed affidavit but wanted to wait until he saw the government’s redactions before making a decision.