The FBI agents who raided former President Donald Trump’s home were reportedly searching for classified documents related to nuclear weapons.
According to a report Thursday night in The Washington Post, the unusual nature of the material explains the unprecedented nature of the raid — storming a former president’s home in a dispute over document custody.
The Post cited “people familiar with the investigation” speaking on condition of anonymity.
Those sources “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,” the Post wrote.
Neither anyone from the U.S. government or the Trump team had any comment to The Post.
But The Post cited one former Justice Department official saying that documents at the “highest classification level” would, if true, be why the FBI moved suddenly despite what Mr. Trump and his legal team have called months of cordial negotiations on the dispute.
“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,” David Laufman, the former chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence section that investigates leaks of classified information, told the Post.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.