Former U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that the U.S. judiciary’s search for classified documents in early August was “unjustified,” in response to a procedural text released by the U.S. Justice Department that includes rationales for the search process.
Trump’s comments came ahead of a court hearing scheduled for Thursday to consider the former president’s request last week for an independent expert to review documents seized by the FBI from his home on Aug. 8.
His statements also come from his lawyers in response to an adversarial text released by the Justice Department on Tuesday evening Wednesday, which explains in great detail the reasons for the raid.
This procedural document explains why the FBI raided Trump’s residence on August 8 to obtain “top secret” documents he kept after he left the White House despite repeated requests to return them.
The Justice Department said the investigation is specifically aimed at determining whether Donald Trump or his relatives engaged in criminal conduct in an attempt to stop the FBI from returning the documents.
She added that prior to the operation, the FBI found “evidence from multiple sources” indicating that “classified documents” were still at the Trump residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
She added that the police “also received evidence that government documents were likely to be hidden or handed over (…) and that actions were also taken to interfere with their investigation.”
Specifically, the ministry described how FBI agents first went to Mar-a-Lago to retrieve a number of files, and a Trump team member made a “sworn statement” confirming that he was the last person left at home.
But in an August raid, federal police uncovered about thirty boxes of highly sensitive documents, classified “secret” and “top secret,” to the point where FBI and Justice Department lawyers requested “clearance” to be able to view them. .
– FLOWED – On the last page of the DOJ report, there is a photograph of FBI-issued documents marked “Top Secret” on the carpet.
“It’s appalling how the FBI randomly dropped documents on the ground during a search in Mar-a-Lago (Maybe to make it look like I did!”),” Trump wrote on his Truth Social on Wednesday. confirming that he had previously declassified them.
Trump’s lawyers said in a court document on Wednesday that the search that caused the political storm was “unprecedented, unnecessary and without legal basis” as part of a “erroneous search to criminalize the former president’s possession of the presidential and personal archives in a secure location.”
Lawyers felt that investigators should not have been surprised by the presence of classified documents in the archives of the White House.
They wrote that “the alleged basis for launching this criminal investigation is the alleged discovery of sensitive information in 15 drawers” of presidential documents held at Trump’s Florida residence and discovered by the National Archives in January.
“But this ‘discovery’ was to be expected, given the nature of the presidential archives. In other words, the idea that the presidential archives contain sensitive information should not have been a cause for concern.”
The Republican, who is considering running in the 2024 presidential election, has been denouncing the political “campaign” against him for months.
But the Justice Department claims it introduced the measures that led to the raid to “correct the incomplete and inaccurate narrative contained in Trump’s statements.”
– “National Security” – A court hearing is scheduled for Thursday to consider the former president’s request last week for an independent expert to review documents seized by the FBI from his home.
The DOJ document came in response to that request, and the lawyers’ document came in response to the DOJ, which said on Wednesday that if Trump’s request for an independent expert is accepted, investigators could be denied access to the documents, saying it “would serious damage to the interests of the state, including in matters of national security”.
The investigation and research at Mar-a-Lago began after the National Archives handed over 15 boxes of documents that Donald Trump took when he left the White House.
Some of these documents indicated that the information they contained was provided to US intelligence by “human sources”, informants, and other undercover agents.
Inspection of these boxes convinced the FBI that the former president had other documents.
The former president is under another investigation over his attempts to invalidate the results of the 2020 presidential election and his role in his supporters’ attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
But currently he is not pursued.
