The FBI is desperately attempting to contain the public relations fallout of a nine-hour raid on a former president’s home that it conducted on Monday. Now, it has come up with an unlikely cover story for the operation: It was all to recover and safeguard nuclear secrets.
The Washington Post has reported based on its ‘sources’ that the FBI was allegedly searching for classified materials related to the United States’ nuclear weapons program.
“Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation,” WaPo reported.
“Experts in classified information said the unusual search underscores deep concern among government officials about the types of information they thought could be located at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and potentially in danger of falling into the wrong hands,” the Post proffered.
“The people who described some of the material that agents were seeking spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation,” the Post continued. “They did not offer additional details about what type of information the agents were seeking, including whether it involved weapons belonging to the United States or some other nation. Nor did they say if such documents were recovered as part of the search. A Trump spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Justice Department and FBI declined to comment.”
This is the first report to assert that classified nuclear weapons documents were in the possession of former President Donald Trump.
The FBI’s accusation the former president had stolen nuclear weapons documents as a predicate to the agency’s raid of Mar-A-Lago is notable because it stands in stark relief to the handling of a similar case involving a Clinton White House official.
The National Archives recounts the arrest of now-deceased Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, who “illegally took classified documents from the National Archives on more than one occasion.”
“During his visits to the Archives, it was determined that Berger folded the documents in his clothes, walked out of the National Archives building in Washington, D.C., and placed them under a nearby construction trailer for retrieval later on,” the National Archives states.” Two years later Berger was sentenced to 100 hours of community service and probation and fined $50,000. He also also had to pay $6,905 for the administrative costs of his two-year probation. Berger also lost his security clearance and license to practice law. ”
As CNN reported, among the documents in Sandy Berger’s possession were nuclear secrets.
“A government source said some of the documents at issue were classified as ‘code word’ materials — the highest level of secrecy in the U.S. government, held more closely than nuclear secrets,” CNN noted.
The nature of the nuclear materials purportedly in Donald Trump’s possession is unclear, but as President of the United States, he had the power to declassify any documents in the federal government.
The New York Times confirmed on Thursday that a subpoena had been served to Donald J. Trump this spring prior to the FBI’s raid.
“The existence of the subpoena helps to flesh out the sequence of events that led to the search of Mr. Trump’s Florida home on Monday by F.B.I. agents seeking classified material they believed might still be there, even after efforts by the National Archives and the Justice Department to ensure that it had been returned,” the Times noted.
“The subpoena suggests that the Justice Department tried methods short of a search warrant to account for the material before taking the politically explosive step of sending F.B.I. agents unannounced to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s home and members-only club,” the report continued.
However, Trump attorneys argued that the subpoena only further confirmed that Donald Trump had cooperated with authorities prior to the unannounced raid.
“The subpoena was first disclosed by John Solomon, a conservative journalist who has also been designated by Mr. Trump as one of his representatives to the National Archives,” The Times noted.
The New York Times corroborated earlier reports here that the FBI was searching for documents that were “sensitive in nature” and were “related to national security.”
“Two people briefed on the classified documents that investigators believe remained at Mar-a-Lago indicated that they were so sensitive in nature, and related to national security, that the Justice Department had to act,” the Times reported.
“The subpoena factored into a visit that Jay Bratt, the Justice Department’s top counterintelligence official, made with a small group of other federal officials to Mar-a-Lago weeks later, in early June, one of the people said,” the report added.
Former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadow invoked the Privacy Act regarding documents pertaining to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane operation on January 20 in a Memorandum for the Attorney General.
The Meadows memo is posted for viewing below. It should be read in full, because it contains essential background that may explain the ambiguity about whether or not Donald Trump ‘complied’ with the subpoena.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, who said at a press briefing that he had ‘personally approved’ of the FBI’s Trump raid, has moved to unseal the search warrant that was used as a basis for the Trump estate raid. The manifesto for the FBI raid has also been sealed, but media organizations are attempting to make it public.
However, it should be known that the FBI used Hillary Clinton’s political opposition research against Donald Trump for FISA warrant applications to carry out illegal campaign surveillance. An FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, even falsified evidence. His license to practice law has already been restored to ‘good standing’ in the State of New York.
None of the lawless officials who carried out a political vendetta against the former President of the United States were ever held fully accountable by the Department of Justice or the FBI. Thus, there is no reason to believe the FBI’s purported justification for continuing its relentless witch hunt against a duly elected President of the United States.
Current Founder, CEO and Chief Editor of Becker News. Former Writer & Associate Producer at Fox News for #1 top-rated prime-time cable news show. Former Director of Viral Media and Senior Managing Editor for award-winning startup website IJReview, which grew to a readership of 20-30 million Americans a month. Led editorial and social media team that was #1 ranked news & politics publisher on Facebook for story engagement. Writer whose thousands of digital articles have been read by over 100 million unique users.