Trump raid: Empty folders marked with classified banners found during searches at his Mar-a-Lago home, officials say | US News
FBI agents found empty folders marked with classified banners when they searched Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home last month, according to the US Justice Department.
The details were revealed in a more detailed inventory of seized material made public by the department.
It generally describes the contents of 33 boxes taken from the former president’s home in Florida during an August 8 raid.
It also shows the extent to which newspapers, magazines and other items have been mixed with documents that investigators say have been marked as top secret and top secret.
The Justice Department said there was no safe space at Mar-a-Lago for such sensitive government secrets.
It has opened a criminal investigation focusing on why they were kept there, and what it says are efforts to thwart that investigation over the past few months.
The inventory shows 43 empty folders with classification banners taken from a box or container at the office, along with 28 empty folders labeled as “return to staff secretary” or military assistant .
Such empty folders are also found in a storage cabinet.
It’s not clear from the inventory why any of the folders were empty or what might have happened to any of the documents inside.
It came after Mr. Trump’s lawyers try to lower the discovery of top secret files at his Florida mansion.
An image has been published in a court filing show top secret documents detected in the search, some of which were marked as “top secret //sci”.
“Simply put, the notion that presidential records would contain sensitive information has never been cause for alarm,” Trump’s lawyers, in a court filing, said in a statement.
They also attacked the Justice Department for conducting the search, saying Mr Trump was involved in a “give-and-take” with the US National Archives over the return of presidential records at the time. is “standard”.
The filing also claims Mr Trump allowed FBI agents “to come to his home and give security advice”.
