In the aftermath of the FBI search warrant raid at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Palm Beach compound on Monday, the general consensus among inside sources and experts has been that the search warrant was issued on the basis of classified, top-secret, and federally protected National Archives documents that Donald Trump illegally took from the White House upon the end of his term. However, what has remained unclear is what type of information, specifically, was contained in the classified documents that FBI officials were searching for at the scandal-ridden ex-president’s resort/home.
That is, until now, anyway.
On the heels of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s impromptu press conference this afternoon — in which he revealed that the US Department of Justice will be filing a motion to unseal the search warrant issued against Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, much to the ex-president’s clear dismay — the Washington Post now reports that inside sources are saying the FBI was specifically searching for classified documents, taken by the corrupt ex-president, that were related to nuclear weapons.
The Post reports:
Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation.
Experts in classified information said the unusual search underscores deep concern among government officials about the types of information they thought could be located at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and potentially in danger of falling into the wrong hands.
The people who described some of the material that agents were seeking spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. They did not offer additional details about what type of information the agents were seeking, including whether it involved weapons belonging to the United States or some other nation. Nor did they say if such documents were recovered as part of the search. A Trump spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Justice Department and FBI declined to comment.”
Stay up-to-date with the latest news!
Subscribe and start recieving our daily emails.
Garland was clear during today’s press briefing that he could not divulge any further details or information regarding the Mar-a-Lago search warrant — but did announce that he personally signed off on Monday night’s search warrant and would be unsealing the warrant on the basis of Donald Trump’s public confirmation of the raid in the direct aftermath.
David Laufman, the former chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence section — the department responsible for investigating leaks of classified government information — weighed in on the new information to the Post, saying, “If that is true, it would suggest that material residing unlawfully at Mar-a-Lago may have been classified at the highest classification level. If the FBI and the Department of Justice believed there were top secret materials still at Mar-a-Lago, that would lend itself to greater ‘hair-on-fire’ motivation to recover that material as quickly as possible.”
Read the full report from the Washington Post here.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
