Former President Donald Trump left a shocking number of the government’s most highly sensitive secrets unguarded at his Mar-a-Lago residence, including documents detailing U.S. nuclear weapons, defense vulnerabilities and plans for a potential attack on Iran.
A Justice Department indictment unsealed this month said Mr. Trump willfully retained national defense information. Unlike other government markings such as confidential or top secret, which can be declassified, national defense information outside a secure government facility is illegal to possess. Such documents show military strengths and weaknesses and methods and sources for gathering that information.
Federal prosecutors don’t provide details of secrets in other classified documents, but their dates aligning with key foreign policy moments of the Trump administration include:
• A June 2020 document concerning the nuclear capabilities of a foreign country. Although the country is unidentified in the indictment, it is widely thought to be Russia because the document is dated around the time Moscow published its previously classified nuclear deterrence policy.
• A May 9, 2018, document detailing intelligence related to foreign countries. It is dated the same day Mr. Trump gave a televised speech withdrawing the U.S. from the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal.
• A January 2020 document concerning the military options of a foreign country and its “potential effects on United States interests.” This document is from roughly the same time Iran launched ballistic missiles at an air base in western Iraq, though it is unknown what the document detailed.
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• A March 2020 document “concerning military operations against U.S. forces.” This document coincides with a Hezbollah attack on Camp Taji in Iraq that killed two Americans and a British soldier. The U.S. and Britain struck back at Hezbollah with air raids.
Mr. Trump is charged with 37 federal counts, including 31 counts of willful retention of classified government documents. The other counts include making false statements to federal agents and obstruction of justice.
He has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges.
“For something to be top secret, its disclosure has to cause extraordinarily grave harm to the U.S., and some of the 31 documents had even more sensitive markings,” said Jamil Jaffer, a former senior counsel for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Perhaps more stunning, he said, was the sensitive nature of the materials strewn about Mr. Trump’s residence and office at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.
“The fact that you have these documents in fairly open facilities where we know both American and foreign officials were traipsing around the property is extremely problematic,” Mr. Jaffer said.
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In an audio recording leaked to CNN and aired Tuesday, Mr. Trump acknowledges that he held on to a classified Pentagon document about a potential plan to attack Iran.
“These are the papers,” Mr. Trump says in the recording of a July 2021 interview he gave at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club to people working on a book about his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows.
Mr. Trump began discussing a plan by Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to attack Iran if necessary. The transcript of a portion of the conversation is included in the indictment.
“He said that I wanted to attack Iran. Isn’t it amazing?” Mr. Trump says of Mr. Milley. “I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him. They presented me this — this is off the record but — they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him.”
Mr. Trump later says: “As president, I could have declassified it. Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
Materials found at Mar-a-Lago included signals intelligence, according to the indictment. Among them were intercepted communications from foreign governments and data gathered from confidential human sources.
A tranche of documents was labeled SI/TK, which means satellite imagery of foreign military operations.
Some of the markings on the documents indicate that they could be shared only with the so-called Five Eyes intelligence community comprising the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Britain. That suggests the information detailed in those materials didn’t originally come from U.S. intelligence sources.
Of the 31 documents listed in the indictment, 10 were labeled as sensitive compartmented information and eight were marked as special access programs, meaning they were among the government’s most sensitive materials.
Only a small list of high-level government officials can access SCI and SAP documents, and those can be viewed only in a specialized facility for confidential materials.
In his 49-page indictment, special counsel Jack Smith underscored the national security implications of the documents found in Mr. Trump’s possession.
Mr. Smith wrote that the number of people with knowledge of these documents would be “reasonably small and commensurate with the objective of providing enhanced protection for the information involved.”
“Only individuals with the appropriate security clearance and additional SAP permissions were authorized to have access to such national security information, which was subject to enhanced handling and storage requirements,” he wrote.
National security experts fear the haphazard storage of such critical materials could lead to the loss of irreplaceable sources and access that took years to become fruitful. The security breach could have a lasting impact on how the U.S. collects and shares data with its allies, they said.
“I have no doubt the national security agencies have been engaged in a damage assessment,” said Patrick Eddington, a senior fellow for homeland security and civil liberties at the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank. “They need to know what they are dealing with and who the hell did Trump show this stuff to. If it was a foreign national or an American citizen with ties to foreign nationals, this could be a major problem.”
Mar-a-Lago has been the target of foreign intelligence.
A Chinese national was arrested in 2019 on charges of trespassing and lying to authorities after being caught with a device that blocks electromagnetic signals, nine USB drives, five SIM cards and a signal detector to pick up the presence of hidden cameras.
She was the second Chinese national arrested on charges of trespassing at Mar-a-Lago.
Mr. Eddington said the intelligence community is operating under the assumption that at least some of the classified information may have been compromised and is working to mitigate the fallout. That could mean the CIA or other agencies are ending programs, cutting loose human sources or removing them from their locations for protection.
The Justice Department might not have disclosed all the materials seized at Mar-a-Lago. Some of it could be too sensitive to list in a court document.
The 31 documents detailed in the indictment may have been included because they were less sensitive than other materials discovered at Mar-a-Lago. Another possibility is that Mr. Trump lost or misplaced documents he brought to Mar-a-Lago.
Federal prosecutors issued a subpoena related to a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran. The subpoena was issued in March after prosecutors obtained the audio recording of Mr. Trump discussing it at Bedminster.
Mr. Trump’s attorneys responded that they couldn’t find the document, underscoring the challenge of retrieving the materials.
Mr. Smith’s team complained last year to a federal judge that they couldn’t be sure they recovered all of the documents with classified markings, even after the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago in August.
The highly sensitive nature of the documents could create an uphill battle for Mr. Trump’s attorneys as they work for an acquittal.
“It ratchets up the seriousness of the case and gets right to the heart of the Espionage Act,” said Jared Carter, a constitutional law professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School. “The national defense information is so critical to the prosecution’s case and very damning to Trump’s defense.”
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
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