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“The Justice Department on Monday rebuffed efforts to make public the affidavit supporting the search warrant for former President Donald Trump’s estate in Florida, saying the investigation ‘implicates highly classified material’ and the document contains sensitive information about witnesses… Trump, in a Truth Social post early Tuesday, called for the release of the unredacted affidavit in the interest of transparency…
“A property receipt unsealed Friday showed the FBI seized 11 sets of classified documents… The search warrant, also unsealed Friday, said federal agents were investigating potential violations of three different federal laws, including one that governs gathering, transmitting or losing defense information under the Espionage Act. The other statutes address the concealment, mutilation or removal of records and the destruction, alteration or falsification of records in federal investigations.” AP News
Here’s our prior coverage of the search. The Flip Side
The right calls for more transparency, and argues that the evidence so far doesn’t indicate any threat to national security.
“Beginning in the months before Donald Trump took office, and extending well into his presidency, the media and political world took a set of vague but serious accusations of wrongdoing… By the time a multiyear criminal investigation, with all the powers of law enforcement, was unable to establish that conspiracy or coordination — collusion — had even occurred at all, the damage had been done. Trump-Russia had irreparably harmed the Trump presidency, and the lost years could not be recovered. Now, with Trump 19 months out of the White House, it's happening again…
“The recently released search warrant says things like ‘Miscellaneous Secret Documents’ and ‘Miscellaneous Top Secret Documents’ and, in one case, ‘Various classified/TS/SCI documents,’… But again — what is in the documents? What are they about? We don't know. And that is the key, the central, the most important thing to remember in this case. We are in a classic cycle of hair-on-fire Trump allegations, and we don't know what they are about… The public needs to know what documents are at issue in the Mar-a-Lago investigation and whether those documents warrant the Justice Department's and FBI's actions in pursuit of them.”
Byron York, Washington Examiner
“Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified material was a one-off event that led to an 18-month standoff over the materials, which were stored in an allegedly insufficiently secured environment. Hillary Clinton transmitted classified information, including Top Secret-Compartmented data, for four years over a completely unsecured server and did so with the intent to avoid records requirements. The risk of exposure was exponentially higher in Hillary’s case, and the malice of avoiding accountability with the use of a personal server rather than the State Department’s official system much more obvious.”
Ed Morrissey, Hot Air
“Weeks of meetings strongly suggest a gray area, not a clear and present danger. Mr. Garland’s long period of pondering [whether to approve the warrant] is completely incompatible with a news report that has been widely circulated since last week [that ‘Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence’]...
“If papers in former President Donald Trump’s home represented such a grave threat to national security, why did the Justice Department take so long to act on it? Among the implausible details of this disturbing story has been that after a Justice official and several FBI agents visited Mar-a-Lago in early June, Justice waited several days before merely requesting that a stronger lock be placed on the door of a storage room and then waited roughly two months before seeking a warrant… Their concern was so deep that they had to kick the issue around at meetings for much of the summer before trying to do anything about it?”
James Freeman, Wall Street Journal
“The government’s most important secrets are highly technical and would have little value or meaning for Mr. Trump. On the other hand, every love note from a foreign leader is necessarily treated as restricted when it arrives though it contains no valuable secrets… Whatever was in the boxes, if Mr. Trump knew about their contents at all as he was chaotically vacating a presidency that he pretended for two months he wouldn’t be vacating, he likely saw priceless souvenirs to be framed in a future Trump hotel or presidential shrine, testifying to his place as the greatest president since Lincoln (as he modestly rates himself).”
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., Wall Street Journal
The left worries about the potential threat to national security and other US interests.
The left worries about the potential threat to national security and other US interests.
“[FL Gov. Ron DeSantis stated] ‘You look at the raid at Mar-a-Lago, and I’m just trying to remember — maybe somebody here can remind me — about when they did a search warrant at Hillary’s house when she had a rogue server at Chappaqua and she was laundering classified information’…
“In fact, the FBI took [Clinton’s server] in August 2015. ‘The seizure of the server, along with electronic copies of its contents maintained by her private lawyer, is in connection with a criminal investigation into the mishandling of classified information,’ gloated a National Review editorial at the time. ‘It is being dressed up by a reeling Clinton campaign as Hillary’s ‘voluntary’ surrender of the server in connection with a ‘security inquiry.’’…
“In 2016, the FBI made its investigation into Clinton public while keeping its investigation of Trump secret, a choice that very likely swung the razor-tight outcome. The mistreatment of Clinton was so blatant that Trump even used it as a pretext to fire Comey the next year. Yet Republicans have created an upside-down history in which Clinton was coddled and Trump smeared.”
Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
“Trump is both an inveterate braggart and a terrible secret-keeper. In May 2017, the same week he fired FBI Director James Comey for refusing to protect him personally, Trump disclosed classified information (reportedly obtained from Israel) to the Russian foreign secretary and ambassador during a White House meeting. In April 2019, he posted a photo of an explosion at an Iranian facility, over the objections of intelligence officials, who worried it would undermine future American spying. Later that year, he blabbed about nuclear systems to the reporter Bob Woodward… [This latest development] is at once totally new and unexpected and yet entirely of a piece with everything we know and have seen from Trump.”
David A. Graham, The Atlantic
“We know that the search produced top secret classified documents, reportedly including those relating to nuclear weapons… The espionage statute’s ‘state of mind’ requirement is satisfied, among other intents, by proof that an accused person has ‘reason to believe’ that documents or material unlawfully in his or her possession “could be used to the injury of the United States … ,’ and ‘willfully retain[ed] the same and fail[ed] to deliver it on demand to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it.’…
“It appears that in January, [Trump] gave back some but not all of the official government records that the National Archives sought after he had taken them upon leaving the White House. Then, in May or June, a federal grand jury issued a subpoena compelling Trump to produce whatever documents the subpoena specified. If we assume what seems likely—that the top-secret documents were so included—Trump’s failure to return them does not automatically prove that his retention was knowing and intentional—the definition of willfulness needed for any conviction—but it starts to come close.”
Dennis Aftergut, Slate
“If we are haunted by speculation about what is in the documents, so, you can be sure, are our allies. They will be concerned about whether any of the information in the documents is about them, whether any of it has been shared by Trump, and whether, perhaps most worrying, their intelligence efforts—resulting in information they shared, trusting the U.S.’s capacity to safeguard secrets—may have been compromised… With the FBI raid, the Biden administration will need to assure allies that their shared efforts with us are still reliable.”
Juliette Kayyem, The Atlantic
