The Justice Department’s search of former President Donald J. Trump’s Florida home was spurred by the discovery that he had retained a trove of highly classified material that included documents related to the use of “clandestine human sources” in intelligence gathering, according to a redacted version of the affidavit used to obtain the search warrant.
Highlighting concern among officials that Mr. Trump or his followers could seek to interfere with the investigation, the Justice Department said it had requested extensive redactions of the affidavit in part to protect “a significant number of civilian witnesses” with knowledge of Mr. Trump’s actions. The affidavit, which was sworn to on Aug. 5, also noted that the F.B.I. had “not yet identified all potential criminal confederates nor located all evidence related to its investigation.”
In January Trump turned over 15 boxes and a review of those materials sent up alarm bells.
In those boxes, they found a total of 184 documents with classification markings, including 25 labeled “top secret.” Others were marked in a way suggesting they were related to foreign intercepts collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Some of the documents, the affidavit said, were from the Sensitive Compartmented Information programs, a designation that is one of the most tightly restricted categories of secrecy. Still others had been labeled “originator controlled,” meaning they could not be held without the approval of the intelligence community. Several of the documents, the affidavit said, contained what appeared to be Mr. Trump’s handwritten notes. But agents were most alarmed to discover that many of the materials included the highest national security restrictions, requiring they be held in controlled government storage facilities, and barring them from ever being shared with foreign governments, to protect “clandestine human sources,” or informants employed by the intelligence community to collect information around the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/26/us/t ... rrant.html
Sources and methods are the heart of intelligence, agencies around the world protect them at all costs.
On June 22, the department subpoenaed surveillance footage from various places in the club, including the hallway outside a basement storage area that Mr. Bratt had toured nearly three weeks earlier to see where documents had been kept. The video showed boxes being moved out of the storage room sometime around the contact from the Justice Department, people familiar with the tapes said. And it also showed boxes being slipped into different containers, which alarmed investigators.
As the temperature rose, so did the heat on the former president. On Aug. 8, investigators found additional material, presidential records and classified documents in the basement area, as well as in a container on the floor of Mr. Trump’s closet in his office, a former dressing room in the bridal suite above the club’s ballroom.
https://archive.ph/LiSa1
Judge Garland and the FBI gave Trump plenty of opportunities to return classified documents, his response was the usual.
On Friday morning, before the documents were released, Mr. Trump attacked the department on Truth Social, the social media platform he uses to communicate since being banned from Twitter after the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021. He called the Justice Department and the F.B.I. “political Hacks and Thugs” who “had no right under the Presidential Records Act to storm Mar-a-Lago and steal everything in sight, including Passports and privileged documents.” He spent much of this week huddling with his lawyers to discuss the array of legal problems he now faces, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.
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