This greatly complicates any public discussion of the documents or any documentation of Trump’s potential violation of US law. The sources, briefed on the investigation, requested anonymity to discuss sensitive information. Former US President Donald Trump leaves Trump Tower to meet with New York Attorney General Letitia James for a political investigation on August 10, 2022 in New York. (Photo by James Devaney/GC Images) James Devaney/GC Images “Compartmented” is a specific term meaning “classified information relating to or derived from intelligence sources, methods, or analytical procedures required to be addressed in the official access control systems established by the Director of National Intelligence.” It includes a variety of different access categories – for example, human sources, intercepts, satellite sources – each of which limits the number of people who can know the nature of the apartment. One of the government sources says that “special access program” information was involved in the Mar-a-Lago case, a further category of information that is limited to an even smaller group of people. Sources familiar with the classification system and the investigation say neither the search warrant nor the inventory, if unsealed, will likely answer most people’s questions about whether the search was necessary. “To prove that this was a matter of national security and it’s necessary to do it that way, some details about what Trump was holding would have to be revealed,” says one intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. talk about an ongoing investigation. Newsweek. “This can be difficult for the government precisely because of the sensitivity of the documents.” Under normal circumstances, investigators write a detailed list of all materials taken from a person or property being searched, filing a copy of that list with the court that issued the search warrant. But in the case of classified documents, the inventory list can be deliberately vague: for example, “ten documents, numbered 1 through 10, consisting of 65 pages, stamped top secret or more.” Since the assumption is that the search warrant can be made public, neither the inventory nor the search warrant will include classified information. The former president does not have the authority to declassify such documents, intelligence sources say, because they are classified by law, not by executive order. Trump’s possession of these documents and his concealment of them came to light during a months-long federal government investigation focused on the status of presidential records obtained from the White House. On Monday morning, FBI agents and technicians arrived at Donald Trump’s Florida residence and presented the former president’s lawyers with a search warrant to retrieve highly classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. According to Trump representatives, FBI investigators focused on three rooms in the residence. Trump said the FBI had broken into at least one of his safes, possibly in Trump’s office or the bedroom where he was found. The information about the documents’ whereabouts, as Newsweek previously reported, came from a confidential human source, possibly someone within the Trump camp. Although he did not identify any details of the investigation, Attorney General Merrick Garland said Thursday that the Justice Department was seeking the release of the search warrant and inventory of property taken from Mar-a-Lago. This request must be agreed to — formally, not just in public statements — by Donald Trump. Given the political firestorm the Mar-a-Lago investigation has created, questions about the documents are critical. If it was just “routine,” as Trump insists, then the investigation would be seen as politically motivated. The furor may be quelled if the documents are indeed revealed to be top secret and sensitive and the Justice Department can prove the former president kept them with no intention of returning them. The public may conclude that the search was valid and necessary. The road to the Mar-a-Lago investigation began 18 months ago in the transition from the Trump administration to the Biden administration. In inventorying the presidential records, the National Archives and Records Administration concluded that there were additional documents in Donald Trump’s possession that were “presidential records” and not personal documents and therefore should be returned to the Archives. Months of negotiations followed and in January 2022, 15 boxes of such boxes were delivered to the Archives. This collection led to further suspicions that the Trump camp had even more. Federal investigators began interviewing staff at the White House and Trump’s Mar-a-Lago to determine what was in motion. Those interviews and a broader investigation overseen by a U.S. attorney led to a grand jury subpoena served on Trump in late May to produce specific documents. According to John Soloman, a reporter for Just the News who has also served as one of Donald Trump’s liaisons to the National Archives, the subpoena sought any remaining documents in Trump’s possession with any identifying marks, even if they involved photographs. of foreign leaders, correspondence or memorabilia from his presidency. On June 3, three FBI special agents and a senior Justice Department official visited Mar-a-Lago to discuss any additional documents in response to the subpoena. The visiting officials were shown the basement storage room where the White House records were kept and, in compliance with the subpoena, left “a small number of documents,” according to Solomon. The documents were classified as top secret and segregated, according to people familiar with the investigation. Trump and his representatives say the visit was cordial and that the Trump camp cooperated fully. After the June visit, according to the Trump camp, communications with investigators ceased until agents showed up on Monday to execute the search warrant. According to people familiar with the investigation, the decision to escalate the matter to a surprise investigation came because investigators concluded that additional documents existed at Mar-a-Lago—documents so sensitive they needed to be retrieved to protect national security. The search warrant was approved by a Florida judge on Friday, August 5, and three days later, the FBI showed up at Mar-a-Lago to conduct the search. About 12 additional boxes of records were hauled away. The FBI took an inventory of what was recorded and left behind a two-page inventory of Trump’s lawyers. After the investigation, the Trump camp insists that President Trump had the right to declassify information and therefore none of the records were classified. Cash Patel, a Trump loyalist who served in government intelligence and defense positions (and who also identifies himself as one of Donald Trump’s National Archives spokespeople), told the Just The News podcast that Trump was the “ultimate arbiter » of classifying a document and therefore there could be no wrongdoing. That designation is incorrect, experts say, because documents covered by the statute and not classified under a presidential executive order cannot be classified or declassified by the president. This includes nuclear secrets (under the Atomic Energy Act) and documents that might identify CIA officers or agents (under the Identity Protection Act of 1982). The Washington Post reported that the documents searched at Mar-a-Lago were related to nuclear weapons. This Act designates as a CIA source “a person, other than a citizen of the United States, whose past or present intelligence relationship with the United States is classified information and who is a current or former agent or a current or former informant or source operational assistance to an intelligence agency’. Bill Leonard, who headed the Office of Information Security Oversight for six years in the Bush administration and oversaw that system, makes a clear distinction between information classified under Article 2 of the President’s constitutional authority as commander-in-chief and that classified under law, such as nuclear secrets and intelligence sources and methods relating to human agents. “This type of information and other sensitive sources and methods of information are protected under the law, not necessarily under the president’s unilateral declassification authority,” Leonard told the Grid this week. “Thus, even a sitting president does not have full, unfettered authority to declare unclassified information at will. Certainly, a former president does not have the authority to declassify any type of information.”
