Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Maggie Haberman

The former president and his allies have given often conflicting defenses of his retention of classified documents, without addressing why he had kept them.

The Homeland Security Department’s inspector general told the Secret Service to halt its internal investigation into how phone records from around Jan. 6 were purged.

Explosive testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide, has raised questions about President Donald J. Trump’s actions on the day of the Capitol…