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A former DOJ official who oversaw Hillary Clinton’s emails said the documents retrieved at Mar-a-Lago were “outrageous.”
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FBI agents found Trump with 11 sets of highly sensitive government information.
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One set of documents contains sensitive information in compartments.
A former Justice Department official who oversaw the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails said the sensitivity of the documents the FBI retrieved from Mar-a-Lago was “extremely astonishing and particularly blatant”.
On Monday, the FBI searched former President Donald Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Florida, confiscating 11 sets of the former president’s classified documents. Trump is under investigation by the DOJ as to whether he has violated three federal laws, including the Espionage Act.
According to a search warrant released by the Department of Justice, one of these sets of top-secret information was classified as sensitive information, which is the highest level of sensitivity a classified document can receive.
“The fact that he had SCI material in the wild, so to speak, is at risk is particularly astounding and particularly egregious,” David Laufman, the former head of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence division, told presenter Erin Burnett. on CNN.
The release of top secret information could cause “exceptionally serious damage” to national security, according to Executive Order 13526.
One of Trump’s many defenses after the search was that the documents found in his home had been released, but there is little evidence that this is the case.
Laufman told CNN that Trump had a “consistent blatant disregard for protecting classified information and contempt for the intelligence commission during his presidency” and was not surprised that the former president was holding onto top-secret government papers.
That said, it is nonetheless shocking to me that I have overseen the prosecution of multiple defendants under the provisions of the Espionage Act, to see the same statute drafted as the basis for a search warrant that was executed on the house. from a former president of the United States,” Laufman said.
Laufman also said the discovery of the documents during the FBI’s search “fully validates the government’s investigation of the former president.”
“Whether this investigation turns into an outright criminal prosecution remains to be seen,” Laufman said.
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