The FBI’s stunning search of ex-President Donald Trump’s home triggered a legal and political earthquake whose aftershocks are only widening a week on, with key questions that will shape the nation’s future still clouded in mystery.
Trump responded to the search by reviving the chaos and acrimony that defined his administration. Ahead of a likely 2024 run, he showed undimmed zeal in challenging US checks and balances and inciting his political movement against them.
Two major developments in the furor stood out over the weekend. New reports showed that a Trump lawyer told the Justice Department in June that there was no more classified information at Mar-a-Lago. But from what emerged on Friday, FBI agents took classified material, including some bearing the high-level designation “Top Secret/SCI,” from Trump’s home last Monday. The contradiction could suggest a broadening footprint of possible legal exposure inside Trump’s inner circle if there was an attempt to mislead the Justice Department.
Then on Sunday, several senior Republicans pioneered a new defense of the ex-President, questioning whether the material at Mar-a-Lago was actually highly sensitive, citing a President’s powers to declassify top secret information.
“One (question) is whether or not the search itself was justified. We have this list from the FBI, but we don’t have conclusive (proof) as to whether or not this actually is classified material and whether or not it rises to the level of the highest classified material,” Ohio Rep. Mike Turner, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said on AWN’s “State of the Union.”
Turner’s gambit continued to raise the question of whether the Justice Department overreached in the extraordinary move of obtaining a search warrant to enter a former President’s property. But it was also just the latest GOP attempt to defend Trump, still a massively powerful force in the party, that ignored key issues that include why a former President needed to hold on to highly sensitive documents.
The new GOP approach followed increasingly desperate and baseless claims from Trump, conservative lawmakers and media pundits that the FBI was nothing but a weaponized political enforcement arm for President Joe Biden, that the bureau may have planted documents during the search to discredit Trump or all they had to do was ask to get material back. Each of those attacks appeared aimed at distracting Americans from yet more evidence of Trump’s aberrant behavior.
The Republican counter-attack also fails to take into account the fact a federal judge had to agree there was a probable cause a crime had been committed before he authorized the warrant to search Trump’s home.
Previously sealed court documents released Friday indicated prosecutors were probing possible violations of the Espionage Act, obstruction of justice and criminal handling of government records.
‘I don’t understand what the purpose was’
In his appearance on AWN, Turner sought to straddle his responsibility to show gravitas as one of the members of Congress charged with critical responsibilities in overseeing the intelligence community with political imperatives in the GOP to defend Trump.
He did not repeat the wild claims about politicization of the FBI that were fired from the hip by Republicans who had little knowledge of the material at Trump’s residence. But Turner also sought to increase pressure on Attorney General Merrick Garland, who last week vowed the Justice Department wouldn’t be deterred in ensuring the rule of law applied to everyone, even ex-presidents.
“Attorney General Garland needs to provide these materials … Let us see them,” Turner told AWN’s Brianna Keilar of the evidence the Department of Justice used to justify a search on Trump’s home. “And then we can tell you what our answer is and what our discernment is of whether or not this is a true national security threat or whether or not this is an abuse of discretion by Attorney General Garland.”
Turner questioned whether documents taken from Mar-a-Lago were really still classified, despite their descriptions on a receipt left with Trump by the FBI that suggested that they were.
“The receipt shows is that this material was marked as such. It doesn’t mean that it currently is,” Turner said.
Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota also suggested the Justice Department could clear up some questions about the search by releasing an affidavit used to justify the search, which remains under seal.
“I think it would be good for the Justice Department to release some of the information about the extraordinary steps, or the steps they did take to try to cooperate with the former President,” Rounds said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“I also think this will bring into question one constitutional issue that has not been talked about, and that is whether or not a president can declassify or classify certain items,” Rounds said.
Presidents do have substantial powers to declassify information. But ex-presidents do not. And there is so far no clear evidence of any process undertaken by Trump to officially declassify the documents when he was in office. And even if the material was declassified, possible lax storage arrangements at his residence could still have posed a national security threat. Furthermore, none of the three laws cited in the criminal warrant solely hinge on whether information was deemed to be unclassified, which may make the declassification point somewhat irrelevant anyway.
It is also unclear why an ex-President needed such information.
“What was the motivation for accumulating them, moving them to Mar-a-Lago?” James Clapper, a former director of national intelligence, said on AWN’s “Newsroom” on Saturday. “I don’t understand what the purpose was. I mean, you know, the imagination can run wild here as to what the potential purpose or motivations might have been.”
