Is it common for a U.S. president to have official documents in their personal posession after they leave office?

Question

The Florida home of a former U.S. president was recently raided because he was believed to have several documents that belong to the government in his home. Fifteen boxes of such papers were recovered from the home. The way I've heard the investigation described, the F.B.I. carried out the raid because it was believed there were top secret documents that needed to be recovered among the papers in the Florida home. The unspoken message I seem to hear in reporting on the issue is that the problem isn't that he had official documents in his possession, but that he had top secret documents in his possession. This makes me wonder: is it common for people to have official government documents in their possession after they leave the office of the president?

EDIT: I left the original question. Response to the comment asking about if this question is focused on top secret documents: not exclusively. I wrote this question with the idea of responding to someone hypothetically asking, "what's the big deal? They all take home the papers from their office when they leave". I had a feeling the president was lawfully required to leave all the documents his office created and couldn't take them after the term is over. Official documents is clearly more than just top secret documents.

To address the other comment asking for clarification: I didn't mean sundry items, like a get well letter on presidential letterhead. I meant more substantive documents, like documents from the office of the president that affect national policies or regulations or are official communications with domestic or foreign officials but since I don't work for the White House and don't study any branch of U.S. government closely, I don't know all the aspects of documents created in that office. I searched a little about National Archives ("N.A.") and presidential records. So if it clarifies some: "Presidential records" as defined by the N.A here seems to describe what I'm asking about.

To kind of answer my question, I came across this article from factcheck in my search: the president is not allowed take home records. I feel silly answering my own question, so if someone else wants to write a thorough answer, the factcheck link and the link I included from the N.A., should provide some material for an answer.

I've spent a lot of time working on this edit. Apologies if it didn't improve the question.

Answer 1

The issue is confusing because there are actually several different issues here, as I mention in this answer. These include:

1. Records produced by the Trump administration. Individual documents from this set may or may not be classified (I expect most are not), but under the Presidential Records Act these belong to the United States, not the ex-president, and the government is obligated to preserve them. My understanding is that attempts specifically to gain possession of these (which have been occurring since around the start of the year) have all been requests for Trump and/or his retainers to voluntarily hand them over.

2. Sensitive documents that are being handled improperly or exposed to unauthorized people, such as by being stored with insufficient security or in a place where people without appropriate clearances can access them. This includes, but may not be limited to, documents containing classified information, defense information, and so on.

This second category could involve prosecutable crimes under, e.g. 18 U.S. Code § 798 (Disclosure of classified information) or 18 U.S. Code § 793 (Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information); the second of these was mentioned in the search warrant.

Also mentioned in the search warrant were § 2071 (Concealment, removal, or mutilation generally) and § 1519 (Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy), which could conceivably cover documents in neither category above.

Note that this does not mean that anybody will be prosecuted, or even that the Justice department is attempting to prosecute anybody. It's possible, for example, that they created and executed the search warrant simply because they wanted to get some sensitive documents back under government control and were having trouble doing so via less forceful means, and they'll be happy to let the matter drop now that they've done that.

Also note that, as I mention in this answer, Trump had the ability to unilaterally declassify certain types of documents while he was president, and could do so without telling anyone. If these were not reclassified before the government took back possession of them there would seem to be nothing to prosecute, at least under § 798, for those documents, though the government wouldn't know this until Trump got around to telling them that he'd done so.

Answer 2

is it common for people to have official government documents in their possession after they leave the office of the president?

No. Not in the modern era. In modern times, when the matter was legally regulated, this has been a standard task list item for the transition team of the departing President.

Before this matter (e.g. confidentiality regulation) was formally regulated legally, most Presidents contributed documents to a Presidential library, sometimes with a "do not release" before date.