According to the US Department of Justice, the FBI seized top-secret documents during a raid on a property belonging to former US President Donald Trump. The ministry also said it suspected Trump of violating the Espionage Act.
This emerges from the receipt for the confiscated items, which a court in the US state of Florida published together with the search warrant on Friday at the request of US Attorney General Merrick Garland. Trump had previously written on the social network Truth Social, which he co-founded, that all documents had been released and the secrecy was lifted.
According to the FBI list, investigators found a set of “Top Secret/SCI” documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, which are top secret and can only be viewed at special government facilities. Four sentences were classified as “top secret”, three more as “secret”, and the remaining three as “confidential”.
Die Washington Post reported that the FBI was also looking for classified documents about nuclear weapons. Trump denied this and described the report on Friday as a “hoax”. According to the list, the investigators also confiscated numerous boxes, a pardon for Trump confidante Roger Stone, unspecified information about the “President of France” and two photo albums. The papers that have now been published say nothing about the content of the documents.
“I personally endorsed the decision to seek a search warrant”
The search warrant lists three criminal offenses as possible grounds for possible seizures: collecting, transmitting or losing defense information, removing or destroying official documents, and destroying or altering documents to hamper investigations. The first count – which falls under the US Espionage Act – carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison, the second up to three years and the third up to 20 years.
Attorney General Garland stressed on Thursday that the presumption of innocence applies. At the same time, he underlined that a federal court had authorized the search “after the necessary determination of sufficient suspicion”. “I personally endorsed the decision to seek a search warrant.”
Trump had sharply criticized the operation and accused the government of his successor, Joe Biden, of abusing the FBI for political purposes. According to the White House, Biden did not know about the search in advance. The process is considered unprecedented in US history. Trump was not at his property during the search, but made it public himself.
US National Archives contradicts Trump
After the Trump raid in Florida, concerns about violent attacks also grew, and the names of investigators had been published. “Violence against law enforcement agencies is not a solution – no matter what or who someone is angry about,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray on Wednesday in Omaha, Nebraska.
Trump not only attacked Biden, but also his predecessor, on Friday he wrote on Truth Social that if the authorities had asked him about it, he would have given them all the documents. “The bigger problem is what are they going to do with the 33 million pages of documents, many classified, that President Obama took with him to Chicago?” he wrote in the same message. Trump had previously made the same claim without providing any supporting evidence.
The US National Archives have since denied these claims. According to the legal requirements, after Obama left office in 2017, the National Archives “assumed the exclusive legal and physical custody of the Obama presidential records,” the state institution said. About 30 million pages of non-classified documents were kept in the Chicago area. Classified information would be kept in Washington.
At the beginning of the year it became known that the National Archives suspected several boxes with confidential material in Mar-a-Lago. Trump finally handed over several documents to the agency in January. After that, according to US media reports, there was a further exchange between investigators and Trump’s lawyers. The officials had suspected that Trump or his team were still withholding important documents, the wrote Washington Post citing anonymous sources.