At least one attorney for former US President Donald Trump signed a written statement in June claiming that all of the material marked as classified that was in boxes at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence was at the US government has been returned.
The New York Times reports, citing four people who were aware of the document.
According to the report, the written statement was issued on June 3, following a visit to Mar-a-Lago by Jay Bratt, the top US counterintelligence officer in the Department of Justice’s National Security Division.
This statement is a possible indication of why the FBI approached Trump: Apparently, Trump or his team did not give federal investigators full information about the material that was still in the possession of the former US President.
The FBI, the US Federal Police, seized documents classified as “top secret” during a search of the property. In the search warrant released by a federal judge on Friday, the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, Florida, home was based, among other things, on the fact that the former president might have violated an anti-espionage law. The law contains strict regulations for the retention of national security documents.
Shortly before the search warrant was published, Trump had asserted that all documents confiscated by the FBI had previously been “released”, i.e. the classification as classified information had been lifted. The FBI shouldn’t have confiscated anything either, the ex-president wrote in the online network Truth Social, which he founded himself. They could have had the documents from him “at any time without playing political games and breaking into Mar-a-Lago”.
Trump had agreed to the publication of the search warrant. At the same time, however, he once again described himself as a victim of “unprecedented political arming of law enforcement agencies” by “radical left-wing democrats”. The US Department of Justice, which is also the country’s top law enforcement agency, requested that the search warrant be released. In addition to the order, the judge then also published a list of the confiscated documents.
Accordingly, there were documents that were classified as “top secret”, “secret” and “confidential”. Some of the papers were also marked for viewing only in secure government facilities. According to the newspaper “Washington Post”, documents on nuclear weapons were also confiscated – which Trump apparently rejected with the statement that “the nuclear weapons thing is fictitious”.
According to the list released by the judge, the FBI seized about 30 boxes of documents, along with folders containing photographs and a handwritten note. The officials also took information about the “President of France” and the letter pardoning Trump confidante Roger Stone, who had been sentenced to 40 months in prison in the course of the affair about alleged Russian election interference in favor of Trump.
