Nuclear Or Classified, Mar-a-Lago Spells Disaster For Trump

Over the course of Friday, the circumstances of Monday’s FBI search of Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago have come into much sharper focus, which makes them look much worse for the former president, Julian Borger reported for the US edition of the UK’s The Guardian.

Photo Insert: Nuclear or not, that is an awful lot of classified stuff, especially in view of the fact that 15 boxes of documents had already been removed in January.

The unsealed search and seizure warrant shows that it was carried out, in part, under the Espionage Act, a set of statutes dating to 1917 that have been used aggressively to go after leakers, whistleblowers, and the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.

The code quoted in the warrant carries a maximum penalty of 10 years imprisonment.

The inventory of material taken out of Mar-a-Lago leaves in no doubt the importance of the documents discovered there.

They included top secret and “sensitive compartmented information” (SCI) meaning there were restrictions on its circulation over and above its top-secret status. It should normally only be in a special facility, a SCIF. A SCIF was established at Mar-a-Lago, but it operated as a secure facility only during the Trump presidency.

Altogether, there are five sets of top-secret documents listed, three sets of secret, and three sets of confidential documents, as well as binders of photos, and intriguingly, information about the French president, Emmanuel Macron.

It was the warrant that was unsealed by court order on Friday, not the supporting affidavit from law enforcement which would have provided a lot more detail. So, there is no confirmation one way or another on the Washington Post report that there were nuclear weapons documents among the trove.

Nuclear or not, that is an awful lot of classified stuff, especially in view of the fact that 15 boxes of documents had already been removed in January after discussions between the National Archives and Trump’s representatives, and then again in June under a grand jury subpoena.

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