THE GUARDIAN: Report appears to confirm security officials’ worst fears about the nature of the material Trump refused to hand back
THE GUARDIAN, FOX NEWS | September 7, 2022 theguardian.com, foxnews.com
Federal agents seized the document during their search of Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s Palm Beach mansion in Florida, last month, the Washington Post reported. It appears to confirm officials’ worst fears about the nature of the intelligence he should have returned to the National Archives.
Shawn Turner, former director of communications for US national intelligence, was searing in his criticism during an interview Wednesday on CNN’s New Day:
The fact we now know there were highly classified, restricted access documents about another country’s nuclear defense capabilities stored at Mar-a-Lago is a gamechanger with regard to the risk it poses to our national security.
That these documents may have been seen by unauthorized personnel … tells individuals what our capabilities are with regard to intelligence collection related to nuclear programs.
More important is it identifies or exposes our gaps with regard to intelligence collection.
The bottom line is others are going to look at this information and determine what we know and don’t know, and they’re going to make decisions about their nuclear programs based on that information. And that is an extremely dangerous thing.
The Post’s reporting is only the latest twist in a weeks-long saga over the justice department’s investigation into his handling of classified materials after he left office in January 2021.
Trump, who is mulling another run for the presidency in 2024, attacked the department at a weekend rally where he called the FBI and DoJ “vicious monsters”.
Many others, including Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, have defended the investigation into his retention of government records, saying that it posed a major national security risk.