A member of the Secret Service is seen outside former President Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida on August 9, 2022.
Giorgio Viera | AFP | Getty Images
The FBI seized several sets of classified documents from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago vacation home when agents executed a search warrant there Monday. according to a new report.
Eleven sets of classified documents were among the materials seized in the raid, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing documents reviewed by the outlet. A group of files was reportedly marked as “Miscellaneous Classified/TS/SCI Documents,” which includes an abbreviation for Compartmentalized Top Secret/Sensitive Information.
The others were four sets of top secret documents, three sets of secret documents and three sets of confidential documents, the Journal reported.
Agents took 20 boxes of items, along with photo notebooks, a handwritten note and the “executive grant of clemency” for Roger Stone, a Republican political operative whom Trump had pardoned, the paper said.
Information about the president of France was also on the list of items removed from Mar-a-Lago, the Journal reported.
Trump’s lawyers have argued that the president declassified the materials before the end of his one term, the Journal reported. Trump, who has criticized the Justice Department since first disclosing the raid on Monday evening, has argued that his team had been cooperating with authorities.
A spokeswoman for Trump did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The FBI searched Trump’s home for nuclear documents, among other items, the Washington Post reported Thursdayciting people familiar with the research.
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Thursday that the Justice Department will file a motion with the court to make the search warrant public, in light of the “significant public interest in this matter.”
Garland also noted that he had personally approved the order and condemned the wave of attacks against the FBI and DOJ that followed Trump’s announcement of the raid.
The Journal’s report on the search warrant and related materials came less than two hours before a 3 p.m. ET deadline for the DOJ to report to U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart whether Trump’s lawyers s ‘they would oppose the agency’s motion to disclose the order.
Trump, in an apparent defense against the allegations against him, claimed on social media that former President Barack Obama “kept 33 million pages of documents, much of it classified,” after he left office.
The National Archives and Records Administration appeared to reject his claims, explaining that those pages of records were not classified and were moved to a facility in Chicago “where they are maintained exclusively by NARA.”
Obama “has no control over where and how NARA stores his administration’s presidential records,” NARA said.
But Trump repeated the claim in a later statement, which also said the Mar-a-Lago records were “all declassified.”
“They didn’t have to seize anything,” said the statement sent by Trump’s office. “They could have had it any time they wanted without politicking and breaking into Mar-a-Lago. It was in secure storage, with an extra lock on at their request.”
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