WASHINGTON (Dispatches) -- FBI agents were looking for secret documents about nuclear weapons among other classified material when they searched Donald Trump’s home on Monday, it has been reported.
The Washington Post cited people familiar with the investigation as saying nuclear weapons documents were thought to be in the trove the FBI was hunting in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. They did not specify what kind of documents or whether they referred to the U.S. arsenal or another country’s.
The report came hours after the attorney general, Merrick Garland, said he had personally authorized the government request for a search warrant and revealed that the justice department had asked a Florida court for the warrant to be unsealed, noting that Trump himself had made the search public.
The justice department motion referred to “the public’s clear and powerful interest in understanding what occurred in its contents”.
Trump later released a statement saying he would not oppose but rather was “encouraging the immediate release of those documents” related to what he called the “unAmerican, unwarranted, and unnecessary raid and break-in … Release the documents now!”
On Friday morning, Trump further stated, via his social media platform Truth Social, that he believes the “nuclear weapons issue is a hoax”, comparing it to other investigations he has called hoaxes in the past, including the Mueller investigation into allegations of collusion between his 2016 election campaign and the Russian government and his historic double impeachment.
“Some sleazy people involved,” he said, adding “planting information, anyone?”
Garland’s announcement followed a furious backlash to the search from Trump supporters who portrayed it as politically motivated. On Thursday a man who tried to breach the FBI’s Cincinnati office was shot and killed by police after he fled the scene.
The details in the Post report
came on yet another extraordinary day that reprised the chaos and recriminations of Trump’s presidency, and carved acrimonious new political divides ahead of the former President’s likely run for the White House.
Several U.S. national media outlets, including the New York Times, CBS, the Washington Post, CNN and NBC have asked the court to unseal everything related to the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago.
The suspected presence of nuclear weapons documents at Mar-a-Lago could explain why Garland took such a politically charged step as ordering FBI agents into a former president’s house, as retrieving them would be seen as a national security priority.
If it turns out that Trump did take such material from the White House, it would raise the question of why a former president would need such closely guarded secrets after leaving office. The possibility that such material would be held at an unsecured facility, where guests come and go and where it would be potentially vulnerable to penetration by a foreign intelligence service, would alarm government officials.
Trump was particularly fixated on the U.S. nuclear arsenal while he was in the White House, and boasted about being privy to highly secret information.
In the summer of 2017 he told U.S. military leaders he wanted an arsenal comparable to its cold war peak, which would have involved a ten-fold increase, a demand that reportedly led the then secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, describe him as a “fucking moron”. Trump publicly threatened to obliterate both North Korea and Afghanistan.
In his book on the Trump presidency, Rage, Bob Woodward quoted the former president as telling him: “We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about. We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before. There’s nobody – what we have is incredible.”
Woodward said he was later told the U.S. did indeed have an unspecified new weapons system, and officials were “surprised” that Trump had disclosed the fact.
Cheryl Rofer, a chemist who worked on nuclear weapons at the Los Alamos national laboratory said there were varying classification levels applying to different kinds of documentation.
“Information about the design of nuclear weapons is called Restricted Data and is ‘born classified’. That means it is assumed to be classified unless declassified,” Rofer, who writes a blog titled Nuclear Diner, wrote on Twitter. But she added: “There’s no reason for a president to have nuclear weapons design information that I can see.”
Among the nuclear documents that Trump would routinely have had access to would be the classified version of the Nuclear Posture Review, about U.S. capabilities and policies. A military aide is always close to the president carrying the “nuclear football”, a briefcase containing nuclear strike options, but it would be unusual for those documents to be taken out of the football.
Another possibility Rofer pointed to is that Trump could have retained his nuclear “biscuit”, a piece of plastic like a credit card with the identification codes necessary for nuclear launch. Those codes would have been changed however the moment Biden took office at noon on January 20, 2021.