Former President Donald Trump had hundreds of classified and top secret documents at his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago, in the year and a half since he left the White House. According to a recent Washington Post report, the information he held is “among the most sensitive secrets we hold.”
The slow drip of information surrounding this story has led to confusion and perhaps growing apathy during the traditionally slowest news time of late August when many news staffers take a vacation.
The Washington Report added some clarity in a report published Tuesday night, in a story with bylines that included Josh Dawsey, Carol Leonnig, Jacqueline Alemany, and Rosalind Helderman.
The story outlines the back and forth between the National Archives and the Trump team over legal documents, in particular how Trump’s lawyers were alerted to the fact that the FBI was provided documents retrieved in January as part of a criminal investigation, which suggests that the former president was made aware that holding such classified information ran afoul of the law (that he signed himself in 2018.)
The report reveals that Trump’s closest advisers had been concerned about the stash of documents taken from the White House. According to the article:
In Trump’s inner circle, concern has been rising since June that the former president has created legal jeopardy for himself, according to multiple people in his orbit. “Mar-a-Lago is a big problem,” one of the people said.
How big of a problem? According to one of “two people familiar with the search,” the information was among “the most sensitive secrets” the nation holds:
Some material recovered in the search is considered extraordinarily sensitive, two people familiar with the search said, because it could reveal carefully guarded secrets about U.S. intelligence-gathering methods. One of them said the information is “among the most sensitive secrets we hold.”
Multiple news outlets have already reported that the documents stored in a Mar-a-Lago first-floor storage room included classified, top secret as well as TSSCI, (Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information) considered to be the most highly classified information. The sources cited by the report spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the ongoing criminal probe.
What follows in the report is a detailed tick-tock of how the National Archives, the FBI, and Trump’s lawyers continued a strange and ultimately ineffective back and forth to retrieve more classified documents ostensibly purloined by Trump from his time in the White House, which led to a subpoena of surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago to see who had access to that storage room.
“The footage showed various people entering and leaving the room, according to a person with direct knowledge of it,” the report notes, concluding, “Just under seven weeks later, the FBI moved in.”
Read the full and fascinating report at The Washington Post.
