According to an FBI affidavit made public tonight, 14 out of the 15 boxes retrieved from former president Donald Trump’s Florida resort early this year included classified materials, many of them top secret, mixed in with random newspapers, magazines, and personal letters.
The court documents, which outlined the FBI’s justification for searching the property this month, stated that no area at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club was authorized for the storage of sensitive material and included “probable cause to think that evidence of obstruction will be found.”
The 32-page affidavit is the most thorough account to date of the federal papers kept at Mar-a-Lago even after Trump departed the White House. It is highly redacted to protect the safety of witnesses, law enforcement personnel, and “the integrity of the current investigation.” It also highlights how serious the government’s worries were that the records were there unlawfully.
The letter makes it plain how Trump is now in legal danger as he prepares to run for president again in 2024 due to the careless retention of top-secret government information and the apparent failure to protect them despite months of pleas from American authorities.
On the first page of the document, an FBI agent stated, “The government is pursuing a criminal investigation into the inappropriate removal and storage of classified material in unapproved places, as well as the unlawful hiding or removal of government records.”
Federal agents are looking into possible violations of a number of laws, including one that regulates gathering, distributing, or losing defense material under the Espionage Act, according to documents that have previously been made public. The other laws cover the destruction, alteration, or fabrication of records in federal investigations as well as their concealment, mutilation, or removal.
Trump has consistently asserted that he fully cooperated with government officials despite abundant evidence to the contrary. Additionally, he has won over Republicans by portraying the investigation as a politically driven witch hunt designed to hurt his chances of winning reelection. On his social media page on Friday, he reiterated that theme and stated that he and his representatives had a tight working relationship with the FBI and “GAVE THEM MUCH.”
The affidavit covers a different group of 15 boxes that the National Archives and Materials Administration removed from the house in January rather than the 11 sets of classified records that were found during the Aug. 8 search at Mar-a-Lago. According to the affidavit, the Archives sent the case to the Justice Department after discovering “a lot” of classified information.
A judge was persuaded by the affidavit that a search of Mar-a-Lago was required because of the extremely sensitive material discovered in those 15 boxes. According to the affidavit, 25 of the 184 papers with classification markings were classified as top secret. Some of them had distinctive markings that indicated they contained data obtained from extremely private human sources or from the gathering of electronic “signals” permitted by a special intelligence court.
The affidavit cites a letter from the Archives and claims that some of those classified materials were combined with other documents, such as newspapers, periodicals, and various printouts.
Former senior CIA official and “The Recruiter” author Douglas London “argued that this demonstrated Trump’s disregard for regulations”. One of the classified rules is to avoid combining classified and unclassified material to prevent errors or mishaps, “he added.
The affidavit demonstrates how agents were given permission to examine a substantial portion of Mar-a-Lago, including Trump’s official “45 Office,” storage spaces, and any other locations where boxes or documents might have been kept. They did not advocate examining locations on the property that Mar-a-Lago members utilize or rent out, including exclusive guest suites.
To get the warrant to search Trump’s property, the FBI gave the judge the affidavit or sworn declaration. Agents explain their reasoning for wanting to search a specific area and why they think it’s likely they will find evidence of a potential crime there in affidavits, which often contain crucial information about an investigation.
Normally, the materials are kept under seal while an inquiry is ongoing. But U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart ordered the agency to provide a redacted version of the affidavit by Friday in recognition of the unprecedented public interest in the inquiry on Thursday.
To “protect the safety and privacy of a considerable number of civilian witnesses, in addition to law enforcement employees, as well as to protect the integrity of the current investigation,” Justice Department officials stated in a second document that was released on Friday.
It is impossible to determine the breadth of the inquiry or where it might be going because the second half of the affidavit is nearly entirely redacted. It doesn’t specify who might be the subject of an investigation, and it doesn’t answer fundamental issues like why top-secret materials were taken to Mar-a-Lago after the president’s term even though classified information needs to be stored in a certain manner.
A further indication of the GOP’s unwillingness to publicly break with the former president, whose hold on the party is still strong during the midterm election season, was the fact that Trump’s Republican friends in Congress were virtually silent as the affidavit came to light on Friday. Both parties have sought more details on the search, and after Congress reconvenes from its summer break, members want briefings from the Justice Department and FBI.
The affidavit shows that although Trump’s spokesperson called the probe “pure politics,” it wasn’t the first time federal law enforcement has expressed concerns about the records. For instance, the senior counterintelligence official for the Justice Department paid a visit to Mar-a-Lago last spring to evaluate how the materials were kept.
Excerpts from a letter written by a Justice Department official to a Trump lawyer on June 8 reminding him that Mar-a-Lago lacks a secure area authorized to keep secret data are included in the affidavit. In addition, the official asked that the boxes that were transported from the White House to Mar-a-Lago “be retained in that room in their current form until further notice.” The official also asked that the room at the estate where the documents had been held be secured.
After much back and forth, the search on August 8 yielded 11 sets of secret documents for the agents.
The Friday document’s unsealing sheds light on the defense strategies the Trump legal team is anticipated to use. It also contains a letter from M. Evan Corcoran, a lawyer for Donald Trump, in which he claims that a president has “full right” to declassify records and that “presidential activities involving secret data are not susceptible to criminal penalty.”
The letter was “blatantly false,” according to Mark Zaid, a veteran national security attorney who has criticized Trump for his handling of sensitive information, to claim that he could declassify “anything and everything.”
There are certain legal and technical defenses to some of the espionage act’s provisions, according to Zaid, who questioned whether they would apply to the president. However, some of those clauses lack distinctions that might support a defense.
The affidavit also has a footnote from the FBI agent who prepared it noting that one rule that might have been broken doesn’t even use the term “classified information,” but instead makes it a crime to retain national defense information illegally.
