![]() The Department of Justice told the judge on Friday afternoon that Trump’s lawyers did not object to the proposal to make it public. Trump’s lawyers had been given copies of the warrant and the property receipts on Monday and could have made them public at any time. He did so after Attorney General Merrick Garland declared Thursday there was “substantial public interest in this matter”, and Trump backed the warrant’s “immediate” release. US Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, the same judge who signed off on the search warrant that sparked Monday’s FBI search, unsealed the warrant and property receipt on Friday at the request of the Department of Justice. Trump also kept possession of the documents despite multiple requests from agencies, including the National Archives, to turn over presidential records in accordance with federal law. While incumbent presidents have the power to declassify information, that authority lapses as soon as they leave office and it was not clear if the documents in question have ever been declassified. ![]() They could have had it anytime they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. Number two, they didn’t need to ‘seize’ anything. On Friday, Trump claimed that the documents seized by agents at his Florida club were “all declassified”, and argued that he would have turned over the documents to the Department of Justice if asked. “What the FBI found is the set of documents are not only marked “top secret”, they are marked “secured compartments – which means you can only look at those documents in a highly secured government facility”. “One of the provisions of the Espionage Act is that no one should take classified material for their own private possession, especially if they have no permission from government agencies,” Lucas told Al Jazeera from Birmingham, UK. ![]() Scott Lucas, professor of American studies at the University of Birmingham, said Trump is vulnerable to prosecution under the Espionage Act if it transpires that he took those documents – whether he did it by mistake or intentionally. US law prohibits making public or mishandling classified documents. “Top secret” is the highest level of classification of US government documents. The court records did not provide specific details about the documents or what information they might contain. The seized records include some that were marked as classified and some top secret. The FBI search on Trump’s residence was partly based on suspicions of violations of the US Espionage Act related to the illegal retention of sensitive defence documents, the warrant showed. The property receipt is a document prepared by federal agents to specify what was taken during a search. ![]() The FBI recovered documents that were labeled “top secret” from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, according to court papers released after a federal judge unsealed the warrant that authorised the unprecedented search this week.Ī property receipt unsealed by the court on Friday shows FBI agents took 11 sets of classified records from the estate during a search on Monday.
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