Former President Donald Trump responded to the release of the FBI warrant that was used to search his residence in Florida at Mar-a-Lago this week by claiming that he had declassified all the information.
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on Friday unsealed the warrant and receipts of items taken from the residence after Trump’s legal team said that it did not oppose releasing the information.
The warrant authorized investigators to seize “[a]ll physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 793, 2071,” including “any physical documents with classification markings, along with any containers/boxes (including any other contents) in which such documents are located, as well as any other containers/boxes that are collectively stored or found together with the aforementioned documents and containers/boxes.”
The warrant authorized the seizure of “[i]nformation, including communications in any form, regarding the retrieval, storage, or transmission of national defense information or classified material.”
The warrant authorized agents to take any official government records from when Trump was president and any evidence of “the knowing alteration, destruction, or concealment of any government and/or Presidential Records, or of any documents with classification markings.”
Trump responded on social media by claiming that all the material was “declassified” and that agents “didn’t need to ‘seize’ anything.”
“They could have had it anytime they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago,” Trump said. “It was in secured storage, with an additional lock put on as per their request.”
“They could have had it anytime they wanted — and that includes LONG ago,” Trump continued. “ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS ASK. The bigger problem is, what are they going to do with the 33 million pages of documents, many of which are classified, that President Obama took to Chicago?”
This is a breaking news story; refresh the page for updates.
