He says he is, once again, the victim of relentlessness. In a court document where he repeats that he was targeted for political reasons, former US President Donald Trump wants the appointment of an independent expert to review the documents seized by the FBI and determine which ones he can keep ” confidential”, and which would therefore not be used in the investigations against him. “They took protected documents” by client-attorney confidentiality, he said in a statement.
This search, conducted on August 8 by the American federal police and unprecedented for a former head of state, “was illegal and unconstitutional, and we are doing everything we can to recover the documents,” the Republican billionaire complained in the same statement.
The list of objects seized by the FBI, made public, mentions many documents classified as “top secret”. Investigators suspect the former head of state of having violated an American law on espionage which very strictly regulates the possession of confidential documents. Donald Trump, for his part, assured that these documents had been declassified.
“The government has treated President Donald Trump unfairly for a long time”write his lawyers in the court document, claiming that he is “Republican primary favorite for the presidential election of 2024” as well as the presidential “if he decides to stand as a candidate”. Justice “cannot be used for political purposes”they launch.
To which authorities respond that no documents have been discovered confirming that Trump declassified these records, and the potential crimes cited by the Justice Department to seek a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago would not depend on their classification status.
The National Archives are alarmed
The Presidential Records Act requires that any incumbent president must turn over all of his working papers to the National Archives after his term ends. Since January 2021, the National Archives should have been in possession of the Trump-era boxes, but it took almost a year to recover some of them in January 2022. new york times reveals that among the documents submitted to the National Archives on this date, i.e. a year late, 150 are of a sensitive nature or are classified as confidential. The number raised serious concerns at the Justice Department and helped spark the criminal investigation that led FBI agents to travel to Mar-a-Lago this month to pick up more, said several sources at the New York newspaper.
In total, the government has recovered more than 300 classified documents since Donald Trump left office: the first batch of items turned over in January, another set provided by Trump aides to the Justice Department in June, and finally the documents seized by the FBI during the August 8 search of his Florida residence.
The nature of the sensitive documents Trump took from the White House is unclear. But the 15 boxes he turned over to the National Archives in January 2022, nearly a year after leaving office, included documents from the CIA, NSA and FBI, covering a variety of topics of interest to national security, a source told New York Times. Faced with the highly sensitive nature of some of the documents contained in the boxes, those in charge of the archives seized the Ministry of Justice, which, within months, summoned a grand jury to investigate.
The other source of concern for American justice is the fact that so many highly sensitive documents remained at Mar-a-Lago for months, even as the department sought to obtain their return after the departure of Trump from the White House. Which suggested to justice that the former president or his assistants had been reckless in the management of these documents, conclude sources with the New York Times.
The FBI investigation continues, which suggests that the Department of Justice is not certain to have recovered all the documents of the Trumpist mandate. And the investigations are moving towards the search for surveillance images of Mar-a-Lago, to scrutinize the way in which the classified documents were treated by the former head of state and his staff before the search.
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