= new reply since forum marked as read
Remember "documents" are NOT DOJ's purview, they are NARA's and the document owners' issue (e.g., DOD, State, DOE, etc) and NARA was the one in communications with 45's lawyers "over those 18 months".
Only after NARA finally got 1 set of boxes back, did they realize what was even there and that they had finally exhausted their own authority to retrieve them.... which snowballed into the avalanche of revelations that we see today with bringing DOJ in to carry out legal enforcement mechanisms (subpoenas, search warrants, and seizures, NONE of which NARA, or most other federal agences, are authorized to do on their own).
THAT is how the federal government works. DOJ is not keeper of the federal government. They are the criminal enforcement arm of it.
There is this assumption, for some reason, that DOJ "knew" on January 20, 2021 at 12:01 pm, that "secret documents" had been removed and taken to MAL, and they "sat on" that knowledge for almost 2 years. 
It's a bizarre narrative that keeps persisting and makes absolutely zero sense as to why. 
We seriously need a "Civics 101" group.
perfectly said.
NARA doesn't have direct access to "secret documents". Those are apparently kept within their agencies (whoever generated them) and are tracked. Apparently the fact that there were such items found in that initial set of boxes that were retrieved, probably raised a million alarm bells and suggested there might be more "out there". This is what apparently triggered them to go to DOJ.
By who? They wouldn't know what was "missing" unless perhaps, someone from DOD looked and said - "Whoa - someone 'checked this out' and custody was apparently lost". But they can't jump to that conclusion until they verify that the item was really "missing" (and not destroyed per their Records Control Schedule) and if it was, what happened. They are doing that now.
And if these items were taken by people no longer in the government with the change in administration, and if they did it for nefarious reasons, then they sure as hell are not notifying anyone. And any new people coming into those higher level positions wouldn't know this happened either unless someone was a whistleblower (and there is a whole whistleblower process to alert to a problem if the agency leadership won't act on potential internal criminal activity).
Look what happened with the Secret Service OIG.
Remember, Biden wasn't in office, nor were his appointees, when this stuff was removed on "move out day" (just before and during the inauguration).
Who/what needs to be investigated at this point, and has probably been ongoing OUT of the public view and media, is tracing back chain of custody of these documents. And again, many of the people who might have had that type of access (like Kushner) are no longer there.
Every agency has an "escalating process" where they have some equivalent to a "Compliance Branch" who works with their own agency lawyers to do the info requests and when their targets are still not being responsive, they go to DOJ so DOJ can enforce the requests through the courts.
This revelation literally opened up a whole new realm of criminality outside of "overturning an election" and the violent events of January 6.
a much larger thing, with a lot of moving pieces. And even the obstruction part of it, almost certainly involves other people, other threads, and a timeline that has to be nailed down.
i.e., despite your stated opinion, it is simply not as simple and rote as you would have it to be.
Respectfully - the more you double down on this - the less ...
------ 
------
