Friday, August 12, 2022

Report: Nuclear Weapons Documents Sought At Mar-a-Lago



We think this is what they call a "bombshell":

Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Experts in classified information said the unusual search underscores deep concern among government officials about the types of information they thought could be located at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and potentially in danger of falling into the wrong hands.

The people who described some of the material that agents were seeking spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. They did not offer additional details about what type of information the agents were seeking, including whether it involved weapons belonging to the United States or some other nation. Nor did they say if such documents were recovered as part of the search. A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. The Justice Department and FBI declined to comment.  [snip]

Material about nuclear weapons is especially sensitive and usually restricted to a small number of government officials, experts said. Publicizing details about U.S. weapons could provide an intelligence road map to adversaries seeking to build ways of countering those systems. And other countries might view exposing their nuclear secrets as a threat, experts said.

One former Justice Department official, who in the past oversaw investigations of leaks of classified information, said the type of top-secret information described by the people familiar with the probe would probably cause authorities to try to move as quickly as possible to recover sensitive documents that could cause grave harm to U.S. security.

“If that is true, it would suggest that material residing unlawfully at Mar-a-Lago may have been classified at the highest classification level,” said David Laufman, the former chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence section, which investigates leaks of classified information. “If the FBI and the Department of Justice believed there were top secret materials still at Mar-a-Lago, that would lend itself to greater ‘hair-on-fire’ motivation to recover that material as quickly as possible.”  (our emphasis)

We may be finding out sooner rather than later what the FBI was looking for, as the Malignant Loser has agreed not to fight release of the search warrant that was sealed at the request of the Justice Department.

If the report is true (it is), feel free to speculate on the reasons why the Malignant Loser -- not known for his keen interest in nuclear physics and the throw weights of American missiles -- would be so interested in secreting away such highly classified information.  

BONUS: The Post report also notes that "signal intelligence" was part of the material discovered, meaning the Malignant Loser was in possession of telephone and other communications intercepts likely between world leaders. Blackmail anyone?

(Image:  Sky News Australia)