DOJ revelations could place Trump lawyers in legal peril of their own, experts say

New allegations from the Justice Department on Tuesday could implicate Donald Trump's own lawyers in a potential effort to obstruct the ongoing probe into the former president's retention of classified documents, making the attorneys potential witnesses or even targets in the high-stakes criminal inquiry, experts tell ABC News.

In their 36-page response to Trump's request for a "special master" to review materials seized last month from Mar-a-Lago, top DOJ officials wrote that lawyers for Trump certified in early June that a "diligent search" of the premises turned up just 38 classified documents, all of which were safely secured in one storage room.

"Critically," the department said in the court filing, "the former president's counsel explicitly prohibited government personnel from opening or looking inside any of the boxes that remained in the storage room, giving no opportunity for the government to confirm that no documents with classification markings remained."