FBI agents sought documents detailing aspects of military nuclear capability and weaponry when they executed a search and seizure warrant Monday at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago’s supper club and flophouse, the Washington Post reports.
It’s unclear whether the documents dealt with existing US military capabilities or were assessments of a foreign power’s capability. Why a former president would have such documentation in his personal possession and what his intentions were with the documents is also highly questionable.
The sources who spoke with the Post did not say if the documents were recovered during the search of Mar-a-Lago, but the fact that the FBI undertook the search in the first place is a sign that the government had high confidence in their existence and storage at the Trump club.
“If that is true, it would suggest that material residing unlawfully at Mar-a-Lago may have been classified at the highest classification level,” said David Laufman, the former chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence section, which investigates leaks of classified information. “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.”
Donald Trump and his family have had unusually close relationships with foreign governments who would be interested in US military capabilities and US intelligence on foreign nuclear programs. Trump allegedly received tens of millions of dollars from the Saudi royal family to host golf tournaments for a new pro golf league founded by the Saudis, and Trump’s son-in-law, former White House advisor Jared Kushner got $2 billion from the Saudis for a new investment fund that the royal families advisors characterized as risky given Kushner’s inexperience in the industry and personal business failures.
Trump also had previously shared highly classified information with Russian diplomats, causing a cascade of trouble for US and allied intelligence agencies, and he reportedly had periodic non-official contacts with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Trump said he trusted more than US intelligence agencies.