The U.S. intelligence community will conduct a damage assessment of the cache of sensitive information stored at former President Trump’s Florida golf club for more than a year, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines has informed Congress.
The guarantee, which is the first sign that the Biden administration would assess the possible national security threats, is provided in a letter to the heads of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, and the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff.
It follows the disclosure that 15 crates of records returned from Mar-a-Lago included 184 classified documents, 67 sensitive documents, and 25 top secret materials in a highly redacted document disclosed on Friday.
The cache included papers that would jeopardise “clandestine human sources”—material that might pose a serious danger to those who provide intelligence to the US government in confidence.
According to a letter dated Friday, Haines informed the two panel chairmen that her office will review the “possible danger to national security that might emerge from the publication of the relevant papers.”
The unsealed affidavit ‘affirms our severe worry that among the papers housed at Mar-a-Lago were ones that potentially threaten human sources,’ according to the two committee chairmen. It is essential that the [Intelligence Community] act quickly to evaluate the harm done and, if necessary, to remediate it; this process should go on concurrently with the DOJ’s criminal probe.
By tweeting that Trump’s “reckless handling of our country’s most secret information put our national security at great peril and brazenly violated the Presidential Records Act,” Maloney increased the demand for a probe.
It’made such an examination much more necessary,’ she said.
‘The redacted affidavit makes clear Trump held highly-classified national defence material at a public resort,’ Schiff said in a tweet on Friday. Not only that, but some of it was just thrown in with news clippings and other trash—it wasn’t even in files. The IC needs to analyse the damage right now.
Trump resides at an exclusive club called Mar-a-Lago. Paying members are permitted to host weddings, invite guests, and participate in events.
The recently revealed papers state that “PREMISES are not permitted to keep classified material.”
The letter was published for the first time by Politico on Saturday.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Vice President Biden both emphasised the independence of the Justice Department and insisted that the White House was unaware of the FBI’s August raid in advance, declining to comment on whether there was any security risk posed by the daily revelations about hundreds of government documents held at Mar-a-Lago.
The White House was not told, according to Jean-Pierre.
As part of the current inquiry, attorneys from the Justice Department and intelligence officials will have to go through papers to see if any secrets may have been leaked while being stored at a club. According to Haines’ letter, the matter would be investigated by a Justice Department team that is distinct from the agency’s criminal investigators.
On Friday, Biden made fun of a claim made by supporters of Trump that the president has the power to declassify information, which would prevent any legal infractions.
According to the search warrant, the FBI was looking into Espionage Act clauses pertaining to the removal and destruction of official materials. The affidavit records show that the government had access to sources of information outside those that dealt with whether or not the government was classified.
I’ve declassified everything in the world, I just want to know. President is me. Come on, I can do it! Has everything been declassified? Biden made the comment on Friday as he was ready to depart.
I won’t make any comments. I mean, I’m not familiar with the specifics. I’m not even curious. I’ll leave it up to the Justice Department,’ Biden added.
The Justice Department and her office, according to the Haines letter, “are working together to enable a classification review of pertinent documents, including those obtained during the search.”
According to her letter, it would be carried out without “undue interference” with the DOJ’s current criminal investigation.
The pledge of Haines coincides with fresh information emerging from the records that US Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart ordered be made public.
A exact count of the volume of sensitive information that was kept at the exclusive club for more than a year is included in the papers.
According to the memo that claims the FBI had “probable cause to think evidence of obstruction will be discovered” at Trump’s Florida property, “Trump had 184 classified papers, 67 confidential, 25 top secret, and handwritten notes in boxes sent to the National Archives.”
The FBI also conducted the search out of concern that the disclosure of sensitive information may jeopardise “clandestine human sources.”
The signing agent’s declaration uses the abbreviation for National Defense Information and states, “Based on my training and experience, I know that papers classified at these levels frequently include NDI.” The agent said, referring to Trump, “Several of the papers also included what seems to be FPOTUS’s handwritten notes.”
Agents spotted papers with the markings “HCS, FISA, ORCON, NORORN, and SI,” according to a “preliminary triage.”
Each of those acronyms refers to a distinct kind of information that the government must be protected in a certain manner.
According to the DOJ, “HUMINT Control Systems,” also known as HCS, are systems that are “intended to secure intelligence material collected from clandestine human sources, usually referred to as human intelligence.”
The purpose of the “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” or FISA, is to safeguard information from the country’s international information collecting methods.
Because it would “erode faith” in the government’s investigation, the DOJ said it kept significant sections of the records blacked in order to safeguard the identities of civilian witnesses and law enforcement officials, including FBI agents.
The letter states, “In sum, the Government has well-founded fears that efforts may be taken to impede or otherwise interfere with this inquiry should information in the affidavit be prematurely published.”
The affidavit also claims that since Trump’s Florida residence lacked a safe location to store the papers, agents requested that he lock the basement where they had been housed.
He posted a lengthy comment on Truth Social, beginning it with the phrase “Affidavit substantially censored!!!”
Nothing on “Nuclear,” a complete public relations ruse by the FBI and DOJ, or our close collaboration about document turnover—WE GAVE THEM MUCH—was discussed, according to Trump.