FBI raids Trump’s Mar-a-Lago

[Rick Plant]

U.S. intelligence officials will assess the materials taken from Mar-a-Lago

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence will review materials taken from former President Donald Trump's home in Florida for potential national security risks.

A spokesperson for ODNI told NPR that intelligence leaders will assess what level of harm could come from releasing documents seized from Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort.

"ODNI will closely coordinate with [the Justice Department] to ensure this [Intelligence Community] assessment is conducted in a manner that does not unduly interfere with DOJ's ongoing criminal investigation," the spokesperson said.

Meanwhile, a federal judge said she is inclined to grant Trump's request to appoint a special master to oversee the search of the seized material.

The decision is not final, and U.S. District Judge Aileen Gannon also told the Justice Department to produce "a more detailed" list of the items that were taken from Mar-a-Lago.

This is an initial step in a legal process that will span weeks.

Lawmakers back the intelligence community's move

Rep. Adam Schiff, who chairs the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, who chairs the House oversight and reform committee, praised the intelligence community for their assessment in a joint statement.

"The DOJ affidavit, partially unsealed yesterday, affirms our grave concern that among the documents stored at Mar-a-Lago were those that could endanger human sources," they said. "It is critical that the [Intelligence Community] move swiftly to assess and, if necessary, to mitigate the damage done—a process that should proceed in parallel with DOJ's criminal investigation."

A redacted version of the affidavit used by the FBI to search the former president's home was made available Friday, nearly half of which was unreadable, NPR has reported.

According to the affidavit, 184 classified documents were found among 15 boxes taken from the resort earlier this year. Twenty-five of the documents were labeled "Top Secret."

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/27/1119827517/trump-mar-a-lago-documents-seized-odni-intelligence-assessment

[Rick Plant]

Criminal Donald is now threatening to incite violence in retaliation for the DOJ investigating him. Threats like that are evidence of consciousness of guilt. All it does is motivate the DOJ to arrest him sooner, and it increases the odds of his conviction at trial.

[Rick Plant]

CNN analyst: 25 'top secret' documents could 'cause exceptionally grave damage to national security' if released

CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams explains how the storage of 25 'top secret' and other 'secret' documents found at former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort could threaten US national security..

Watch:

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2022/08/26/top-secret-classified-documents-donald-trump-mar-a-lago-affidavit-unsealed-fbi-vpx.cnn

[Rick Plant]

The Washington Post reported that Criminal Donald took boxes of classified documents with him to enemy nations.

MAGA morons have no problem with this as they seem not to care about our national security or the safety of Americans.

These people are deranged and believe their criminal cult leader can do whatever he wants even if it harms our country.

Criminal Donald criminally violated the Espionage Act just by having certain documents in his home, regardless of their classification or declassification status, and regardless of what he did or didn’t do with the documents. But even with Donnie having already punched his ticket to prison no matter how this plays out, one big question is just what Donnie was doing (or trying to do) with those documents.

Buried deep into a new Washington Post article is this sentence: “Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel, following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

When this scandal first surfaced, the first thing most of us thought about was whether Donnie might have been sharing or selling these documents to Putin or Kim Jong Un, for personal gain. And now we know that, at the least, Donnie was indeed taking boxes of classified documents with him to enemy nations.

The DOJ, the CIA, and others are surely working on trying to piece together just what Donnie was really doing with all those classified documents when he took them into enemy territory. As expected, this just keeps getting uglier for Criminal Donald.

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/27/trump-archives-records-war/

[Rick Plant]

GOP senator: Trump should have turned over ‘all’ documents
https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/3618788-gop-senator-trump-should-have-turned-over-all-documents/

[Rick Plant]

Chris Christie says Trump was wrong to take classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago home

Former Gov. Chris Christie stepped up his criticism of Donald Trump in the wake of the FBI’s raid of the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate, saying it was wrong for him to have brought classified documents to his home.

“It shouldn’t be a hard thing to say, you know, so I’ll say it,” Christie said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week. “That’s wrong for you to take top secret, classified documents back to your house.”

“When I was U.S. attorney, it was wrong for me to do; when I was governor, it was wrong for me to do,” he said. “And when you’re president, it’s wrong for you to do.”

Christie and Trump are longtime friends and fellow Republicans. But they also ran against each other for the 2016 GOP nomination for president and could be rivals again for the party’s nod in 2024.

Most Republicans have turned their ire on the FBI for searching Trump’s house, not on the former president. Christie earlier said that the FBI search of Trump’s safe for classified materials was “fair game.”

“It’s not anything that’s out of bounds to go into a safe and it happens frequently in federal law enforcement,” he said earlier this month on SiriusXM.

On ABC, he again defended the Justice Department’s actions.

“Should they get the documents back? Absolutely,” he said. “And whatever they needed to do to get those documents back they should have done.”

Christie didn’t express surprise at reports that Trump was finding it difficult to hire lawyers to represent him in this case. His current legal team includes Alina Habba, partner in a Bedminster law firm, the Washington Post reported.

“Lawyers take clients for two reasons, either because they think it’s a good case or they think they’re going to get paid. With Donald Trump it’s neither, OK?” Christie said. “The case is not good and he has a reputation for not paying his lawyers. He’s developed that well-earned reputation over the course of time.”

© Advance Local Media LLC.

[Rick Plant]

Spies May Have Targeted Documents 'Mishandled' by Trump: Ex-CIA Official

Former Deputy CIA Director Michael Morell on Sunday warned that spies might have targeted classified documents "mishandled" by former President Donald Trump.

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents raided Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence on August 8, 2022 and seized 20 boxes containing classified documents that were allegedly taken when Trump left the White House in January 2021. Although much about what classified information was retrieved, experts have raised security concerns about the vulnerability of classified information not being stored properly.

Morell, who served as the second-highest ranking official for the Central Intelligence Agency from 2010 to 2013, said Sunday that the classified documents would have been vulnerable to spies working for foreign countries, including potential adversaries—but he added the documents may have been vulnerable before being taken to the Palm Beach, Florida property.

"So, I think they were vulnerable, even at the White House, since they seem to have been mishandled at the White House as well, right? We have to look at that, as well as Mar-a-Lago," he said during an appearance on CBS News' 'Face the Nation.'

At any given point, there is an average of four Americans spying for foreign intelligence services without the knowledge of U.S. officials—and more never even get caught Morell said.

"So, there's a lot of spying going on in Washington, right? And if you're a foreign intelligence service, and you want to target the United States government, what's the number one place you want to target? The White House."

Morell called on investigators to look into whether documents were accessed by those without clearance both at Mar-a-Lago and the White House. Many people who work inside the White House do not have a top secret clearance "so you have to worry about who had access to those documents who didn't have a clearance to do so," he said

While he worked for the CIA under both former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, there were "very rigorous and strict protocols with regard to the handling of classified information," Morell said.

He said he became concerned about how the documents were being stored at the White House when he read the heavily-redacted affidavit related to the search released on Friday.

"The first was the fact that these documents were mixed in with unclassified documents. You had classified documents in the vast majority of the boxes. That suggested to me a sloppiness in the handling of classified documents at the White House," he said.

Questions about what exactly were in the boxes remain, but officials have raised concerns that information related to nuclear weapons may have been among the classified information. The affidavit released on Friday said the FBI found more than 100 classified documents in the boxes they took from Mar-a-Lago.

Newsweek reached out to Trump's office for comment.

https://www.newsweek.com/spies-may-have-targeted-documents-mishandled-trump-ex-cia-official-1737645