The former president’s attorney said that he had been informed that there were no critical data kept in private offices at the Mar-a-Lago estate. On Tuesday, a judge in Florida unreacted further information from the FBI affidavit laying its case to search Donald Trump’s house.
In reality, according to court records, on August 8 officers found three secret documents in a desk drawer in Trump’s office.
Additionally, it claimed that several papers returned in June had Trump’s handwritten comments and that none of the president’s attempts to declassify them were mentioned by his lawyers.
The specifics will likely prompt further questions about Trump’s decision to keep the records and whether he exerted sufficient effort to return them when requested.
The new information was quickly used by the former president’s detractors to assert that malfeasance extended all the way to the top.
It happened when federal prosecutors requested that further information from the affidavit be made public.
Aileen Cannon, a magistrate judge, concurred and signed an order on Tuesday.
It included further clarifications on what one of Trump’s (here referred to as the Former President of the United States) attorneys had claimed in June when he turned over a batch of papers discovered at Mar-a-Lago.
One of the newly revealed portions reads, “During receipt of the production, FPOTUS COUNSEL 1 stated he was advised all records that came from the White House were stored in one location within Mar-a-Lago, the STORAGE ROOM, and the boxes of records in the STORAGE ROOM were “the remaining repository” of records from the White House.”
‘FPOTUS COUNSEL 1 also said he was not informed there were any records in any private office space or other place at Mar-a-Lago,’ according to the statement.
In the additional lines, notes to some of the papers returned in June are also described.
It also states that “several papers included what seems to be FPOTUS’s handwritten notes.”
38 of them had the classification “classified” written on them; of them, 17 were “top secret,” 16 were “secret,” and 5 were “confidential.”
Some of them had the Human Intelligence Control System (HCS) marking, which may help identify informants.
The newly added sentence says, “When presenting the papers, neither FPOTUS COUNSEL 1 nor INDIVIDUAL 2 stated that FPOTUS had declassified the information.”
National security attorneys viewed Trump’s public declaration that he had declassified any materials that were brought home with scepticism.
The updated lines also show that detectives were looking for surveillance images from Trump’s residence as back as far as January.
“Any and all surveillance recordings, films, pictures, and/or CCTV from internal cameras positioned on the bottom level (basement) – on the Mar-a-Lago property… It states, “from the time of January 10, 2022 until the present”.