The FBI agents who raided former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on Monday reportedly recovered 11 sets of classified documents, including some marked “top secret.”
However, the 45th president stated on Truth Social on Friday that he had declassified the documents.
The Wall Street Journal reported that it has reviewed a three-page list of what was seized by the FBI.
“The list includes references to one set of documents marked as ‘Various classified/TS/SCI documents,’ an abbreviation that refers to top-secret/sensitive compartmented information.
“It also says agents collected four sets of top secret documents, three sets of secret documents, and three sets of confidential documents. The list didn’t provide any more details about the substance of the documents,” the Journal reported.
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“The warrant said investigators were seeking all records that could be evidence of violations of laws governing the gathering, transmitting or losing of classified information; the removal of official government records; and the destruction of records in a federal investigation,” the news outlet added.
In all, agents took about 20 boxes of items in approximately nine hours on Trump’s property.
The boxes included “binders of photos, a handwritten note and the executive grant of clemency for Mr. Trump’s ally Roger Stone, a list of items removed from the property shows. Also included in the list was information about the ‘President of France,’” according to the Journal.
“Mr. Trump’s lawyers argue that the former president used his authority to declassify the material before he left office. While a president has the power to declassify documents, there are federal regulations that lay out a process for doing so.”
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“The Biden administration is in obvious damage control after their botched raid where they seized the President’s picture books, a ‘hand written note,’ and declassified documents,” Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich told the Journal.
“This raid of President Trump’s home was not just unprecedented, but unnecessary.”
Trump posted on Truth Social on Friday, “Number one, it was all declassified. Number two, they didn’t need to ‘seize’ anything. They could have had it anytime they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago. It was in secured storage, with an additional lock put on as per their request…”
BREAKING: Trump statement on the FBI’s search warrant: pic.twitter.com/AxDwJJL0mJ
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) August 12, 2022
“They could have had it anytime they wanted — and that includes LONG ago,” he added. “ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS ASK. The bigger problem is, what are they going to do with the 33 million pages of documents, many of which are classified, that President Obama took to Chicago?”
Trump shared a story from the New York Post on Thursday to point out that the FBI did not raid former President Barack Obama’s home in search of government records.
Obama “trucked 30 million pages of his administration’s records to Chicago, promising to digitize them and eventually put them online — a move that outraged historians,” the Post reported.
“More than five years after Obama’s presidency ended, the National Archives webpage reveals that zero pages have been digitized and disclosed.”
