Documents seized in August from Donald Trump’s Florida residence included highly sensitive information about Iran and China that could have exposed US espionage methods, The Washington Post reported on Friday.
One of the documents seized by federal investigators depicted Iran’s missile program. Another “described very sensitive intelligence work targeting China”, according to the American daily, citing a source familiar with the matter.
Leaving the White House, the former US president had taken entire boxes of documents. However, a law of 1978 obliges any American president to transmit all of his emails, letters and other working documents to the National Archives.
A first search at Trump
Investigators seized nearly 11,000 documents in a spectacular search on the basis of a warrant for “withholding classified documents” and “obstructing a federal investigation”. Among these documents were just over 100 classified documents, some of which were classified as top secret and normally accessible only to a very restricted circle and under drastic security conditions.
However, in the luxurious residence of Mar-a-Lago, documents were stored in different places, and in particular in the personal office of Donald Trump, unsafe spaces, according to the Ministry of Justice, which is leading the investigation.
The institution justified the search of Mar-a-Lago on national security issues, arguing that Donald Trump was suspected of violating the Espionage Act of 1917, prohibiting the possession and sharing of highly sensitive documents relating to national defense. .
An independent expert appointed
Donald Trump was also suspected of obstructing the investigation, his lawyers having claimed, before the search, that there were no more government documents at Mar-a-Lago. He has not been charged.
A court has appointed, at the request of Donald Trump, an independent expert to examine the documents to determine their nature, confidential or not. The nature of only 15 of them is the subject of disagreement between the parties, the ministry said in a court document on Thursday.