“Donald Trump is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes.” — Hillary Clinton
The public could see this afternoon the warrant issued for Monday’s FBI search of Donald-Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a brief speech Thursday his department would seek its release and the FBI’s redacted property receipt by Judge Bruce Reinhart, the federal magistrate in the Southern District of Florida.
Garland added that Trump’s attorney has copies of both. Trump could release them himself. Garland beat him to it.
The request is not expected to include the supporting affidavit that would include prosecutors’ probable cause to believe a crime was involved in Trump’s retention of sensitive government documents taken from the White House.
Late Thursday, however, news broke of some of what the FBI sought in its search.
The Washington Post heard from a source that requested anonymity:
Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation.
Experts in classified information said the unusual search underscores deep concern among government officials about the types of information they thought could be located at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and potentially in danger of falling into the wrong hands.
The Post’s anonymous source did not say if any such documents were found Monday.
But what in addition to the sensitive nature of the documents might give them cause for alarm? Perhaps this from April of 2019:
A woman carrying two Republic of China passports, four cellphones, a laptop, a hard drive and a thumb drive with malware on it made her way past an initial security checkpoint at Mar-a-Lago when President Trump was in town on March 30, according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court.
The woman, identified as Yujing Zhang, said she was there to “go to the pool,” when first approached by a Secret Service agent, an affidavit said.
When the FBI searched her hotel room, they found “more than $8,000 in cash, along with an electronic device that detects hidden cameras.”
Trump declared overnight on social media that he would not oppose the release of the warrant documents. “Even though they have been drawn up by radical left Democrats and possible future political opponents,” he added.
Questions remain surrounding what the FBI found and the timing of the search, now, over 18 months after Trump left the White House for Florida.
“Relating to nuclear weapons” might include anything from mention of the U.S. and adversaries’ force posture to sensitive documents that reveal U.S. intelligence methods and sources, or signals intelligence — “intercepted electronic communications such as emails and phone calls of foreign leaders.”
Marcy Wheeler explains what more is at stake if nuclear information was present at Mar-a-Lago:
First, it makes it far more likely that Trump has violated, and can be proven to have violated, part of the Espionage Act, 18 USC 793.
In my post describing the likely content of an affidavit justifying a search of the former President, I noted that somewhere in there, the FBI would have had to anticipate and rule out the possibility that Trump simply declassified these documents which, if Trump could prove it, would render the documents simply stolen documents covered by the Presidential Records Act.
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- Some explanation of why DOJ believes that these documents weren’t actually declassified by Trump before he stole them
But the fact that these are nuclear documents, under the Atomic Energy Act, Trump cannot declassify them by himself. They’re “restricted documents,” the one kind of document that’s true of.
Trump already has a history of wanting to sell nuclear reactor technology to Saudi Arabia. That does not relate directly to weapons, Wheeler notes:
So for now, Trump’s past history of attempting to share nuclear technology with the Saudis for the profit of his closest advisors is just background noise: something that makes it all the more concerning he is suspected of stealing such documents. But if the FBI did not find nuclear documents they have reason to believe Trump stole, then that could change quickly.
It seems since I started writing that the nuclear weapons story has knocked the Doge of Mar-a-Lago back on his heels:
“Nuclear weapons is a hoax, just like Russia, Russia, Russia was a hoax,” Trump declared on Truth Social. The right fringes of social media did get suddenly quiet last night after the Post story broke.
As with all things Trump, stay tuned.
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