Donald Trump illicitly took to his Mar-a-Lago residence highly classified national security documents that could compromise “clandestine human sources” used in intelligence gathering. In other words, the former president endangered the spies of his country and part of the material they had obtained; including “reports obtained by monitoring foreign communication signals.”
This and other facts are detailed in the explanatory memorandum of the affidavit or affidavit with which the FBI obtained from the United States Department of Justice and Attorney General the search and search warrant authorized on August 8 to enter the mansion of the former president in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, and seize the secret documents that he had taken from the White House; some papers that, when Trump ceased as president, should have remained in the hands of the National Archives entity.
In justifying the need for this entry and search at Mar-a-Lago, the person in charge of the investigation by the FBI specified the highly secret nature of some initial papers that the authorities, through the National Archives and the FBI itself, had recovered previously from Trump’s house.
According to the FBI statement, which the State Department made public yesterday by court order, an important part of those first documents recovered from the Trump residence were labeled with top secret marks and national defense information. It was about 15 boxes, in 14 of which there were 184 “unique documents” labeled as classified, of which 67 were marked as “confidential”, another 92 as “secret” and 25 as “top secret”, the federal agent alleged. charge of the matter.
The Department of Justice, led by Merrick Garland, had resisted publishing the text with the motivation of the registry because it feared that it would disrupt the ongoing investigations against Donald Trump by revealing strategies and future plans for the investigations, as well as identities of police officers. , witnesses or sources of the investigation, and other key data typical of a summary secret.
But, at the request of several major US media outlets, federal judge Bruce Reinhart ordered prosecutors from the Garland department to make public the reason for the search, hiding the sensitive data. The result is a text of 32 pages, of which 11 appear completely crossed out and another 12, largely erased.
The FBI searched Trump’s house and recovered the documents that he had taken home under charges of possible criminal offenses related to the violation of the Espionage Law and actions of destruction and concealment of official documents constituting obstruction of justice.
Altogether, Trump seized more than 300 documents totaling 700 pages, The New York Times reported this week. The material not only includes sensitive information from the CIA and the National Security Agency but also from the FBI itself.
The Government rescued the documents in three phases: the aforementioned and the first in January, when the National Archives rescued a batch of 15 boxes whose content triggered the alarms of the Department of Justice and explains the urgency of the subsequent investigations. The second seizure dates back to June, when Trump aides delivered an undetermined but smaller number of papers to the Prosecutor’s Office.
The search was completed with the August 8 search at Mar-a-Lago, in which the FBI seized another 30 boxes of texts and photos that included 11 sets of confidential documents. Some of them were labeled “top secret”: the highest level of classification, reserved for the country’s national security information, as reported in later days.
The feds searched on August 8 58 bedrooms and 33 bathrooms, of the Trump mansion, in addition to several “storage rooms”, according to the motivation partially published yesterday. In it, the head of the investigation was especially concerned about the fact that the former president’s house in Florida did not have an adequate room to safely store the secret documents, which means that since they were transferred there from the White House Until the FBI recovered them, the sensitive papers “were not handled or stored securely.”
Some of the documents contained “what appear to be” handwritten notes from Trump, the FBI chief added.
In an explanatory note to the report, the chief prosecutor of the case and the counterintelligence officer who supervised the search attributed part of the censored fragments in the text of the reasons for the search to the need to protect “a significant number of civilian witnesses”; witnesses whose testimonies, together with the contents of the first package seized, would have prompted and directed the search for new papers at the Mar-a-Lago residence. A fact that was not known until now.
This means that among the likely trusted people who knew what Trump was improperly keeping, and where he was keeping it, not all were as faithful and silent as he might imagine.
