Influential US lawmakers on Sunday called for a closer look at the justification for last week’s court-authorized raid of former President Donald Trump’s Florida seaside resort and whether he harmed US national security by carrying highly classified documents with him when he left. the White House in early 2021.
“We have a number of concerns,” Congressman Mike Turner, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, told the show.“State of the Union” of . “One is whether or not the raid was justified,” which Attorney General Merrick Garland said he personally authorized before a US judge approved it.
“We have this list from the FBI [de lo que descubrió en la casa de Trump en Mar-a-Lago],” Turner said, “but we don’t have [evidencia] conclusive as to whether it is indeed classified material and whether it rises to the level of highly classified material.”
After last Monday’s search, FBI agents seized 20 boxes of material that they said included 11 files of classified documents, including some labeled with the highest security classification that can only be viewed in controlled locations.
Trump’s winter home was not such a place, though the former US leader claims he declassified the material before leaving office, as he would have been entitled to. But US officials have since said there is no paper trail to show he declassified the documents FBI agents found.
In January, Trump, about a year after leaving office, turned over 15 boxes of materials to the National Archives, including classified documents, as required by US law when presidents leave office and return to being private citizens.
He turned over more documents in June after the government obtained a subpoena for the material. But prosecutors later suspected there was even more classified material at Mar-a-Lago, leading to the search last Monday. In seeking court approval for the search, the US said it was investigating Trump for a possible violation of three US laws, including the Espionage Act.
Turner said that “on a bipartisan basis, Congress is saying, ‘Show us the products.’ We want to know, first, what the Justice Department and the FBI told the judge they were going to find and what they found.”
“There is nothing in those boxes that the members of the Intelligence Committee … do not have the ability to see, if it rises to the level of an immediate threat to national security, which is what it would take to raid the house of the President,” Turner. he said. “Because they had several options, including going to court and just asking the court to enforce the citation that they had.”
“Clearly no one is above the law, Donald Trump is not above the law. Attorney General Garland is also not above the law,” he said. “Congress has oversight power. We’ve seen material like this before. We have seen materials that have been sent to the courts. This is unprecedented.”
But Congressman Mike Turner characterized Garland’s authorization of the search as “unprecedented in history, and he has a lot of questions to answer.”
Congressman Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, on the show “Face the Nation” of CBS called Trump’s collection of the classified material at Mar-a-Lago “deeply troubling.” He requested a “damage assessment” by current US intelligence officials on Trump’s classified material and said he was “confident” it would be provided.
He said that since Trump had twice turned over some material, it seems “deliberate that he kept the documents after the government had asked for them.”
“I have seen no evidence of declassification” by Trump, Schiff said, calling Trump’s claim “absurd that everything he took home was automatically declassified.”
Also in CBSRepublican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick, another member of the House Intelligence Committee, urged fellow lawmakers to “reserve judgment” on the reasons behind the unprecedented search of a former president’s home.
But he said, “nobody claims it’s okay to view classified information outside of secure rooms.”
Fitzpatrick requested the release of the FBI agents’ affidavit of their justification for the search when the search warrant was requested from US Magistrate Bruce Reinhart in Florida. However, such affidavits are often not released unless criminal charges are ultimately filed, and there is no certainty that Trump or anyone else will face charges in this case.
Reinhart approved the search. Days later, Garland called for the release of the search warrant and the list of what FBI agents found, and Trump did not object.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told ABC’s “This Week” that President Joe Biden, who defeated Trump in the 2020 election, was not briefed prior to the search.
He said the Garland-led Justice Department “is independent. This is what we believe. We do not interfere. We were not informed. We have learned about all of this in the same way that the American people have learned about this,” through the news about the search and, subsequently, what the FBI agents found.
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