Amid classified documents probe, Trump's records representative sues Justice Department

One of former President Donald Trump's official representatives to the National Archives -- the agency that sparked the Justice Department's probe of Trump's handling of classified documents -- has now sued the Justice Department and the National Archives, demanding access to documents that the government has said may themselves contain classified information.

At the heart of the lawsuit, filed Tuesday by pro-Trump journalist John Solomon, is what Solomon describes in court records as "a binder of documents" -- "about 10 inches thick" -- that come from the FBI's past probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Solomon once asserted that the documents would offer "big revelations" about the probe, which he's called "one of the dirtiest political tricks in American history."

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As ABC News previously reported, Trump tried to make the binder's worth of documents public the night before he left office, issuing a "declassification" memo for much of the material and secretly meeting with Solomon, who was allowed to review the documents and later keep a batch of them.

In closed-door testimony to Congress last year, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson said 10 to 15 staffers working for the National Security Council had been tasked with "making copies" of the documents for Solomon and others. At the same time, Trump's then-chief of staff, Mark Meadows, also had copies of a different "previous version" of the documents, which weren't redacted the same way, she testified.

After the Justice Department expressed privacy-related concerns about them being released, Meadows returned his documents to the department -- expecting them to be reviewed and then made public. But for more than two years, none of those documents were released.

Solomon and another of Trump's representatives to the National Archives, former Trump administration official Kash Patel, have suggested that politics were at play. But in private emails with Solomon and Patel, which Solomon filed in court to support his lawsuit, National Archives general counsel Gary Stern insisted otherwise.

Stern said his agency never received the "binder" that Meadows returned to the Justice Department. The National Archives did, however, receive a box filled with 2,700 pages of documents, which, according to Solomon, were the copies made "in preparation to be released to the news media on the morning of Jan. 20."