FBI agents who searched former president Donald Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida home on Monday reportedly found documents classified above top secret as well as the paperwork for Trump ally Roger Stone’s pardon and information about French president Emmanuel Macron.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the inventory of documents recovered from Mr Trump’s property listed a set of papers bearing markings identifying them as Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information — a level of classification above the top secret level which is often applied to intelligence sources as well as the US nuclear arsenal.
Federal agents obtained a search warrant from a magistrate judge in the Southern District of Florida on 5 August. The warrant reportedly authorized a search of “the 45 Office,” as well as “all storage rooms and all other rooms or areas within the premises used or available to be used by [the former president] and his staff and in which boxes or documents could be stored, including all structures or buildings on the estate”.
The Journal also reported that the agents who searched Mr Trump’s property removed roughly 20 boxes, binders containing photos, one handwritten note and the official paperwork granting a presidential pardon to Roger Stone, the GOP operative and provocateur who has been a longtime ally of and adviser to the ex-president.
The boxes reportedly contained 11 separate sets of classified documents, including documents marked as top secret and the set of “Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information” documents, the latter of which would have ordinarily required to be viewed in a secure facility known as a SCIF. Four of the documents sets were reportedly classified as top secret, three were marked as secret, and another three were marked as confidential, the lowest level of classification in the US system.
According to Newsweek, the agents who executed the search warrant on Mr Trump’s property were specifically seeking documents pertaining to intelligence “sources and methods,” including documents “with the potential to reveal … including human sources on the American government payroll”.
Although US presidents have broad authority to view and disseminate classified information, Mr Trump’s ability to legally possess any such documents ended when his term as president expired on 20 January 2021.
Some of the ex-president’s allies have argued that he declassified any information recovered from his home prior to leaving the White House, but for information to be legally declassified there must be written documentation that the declassification process was followed.
Mr Trump himself made the same argument in a statement on Friday, claiming that “it was all declassified”. He added that federal authorities “didn’t need to ‘seize’ anything” and “could have had it anytime they wanted “.
But Mr Trump would not have had the ability to declassify documents pertaining to intelligence sources or nuclear weapons because documents on those matters are classified under US statutes, not the executive order that governs most classified information in the US. Moreover, he would have had to notify agencies that he was declassifying information and added markings to each document noting that it was declassified.
This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available…
