fbi felt the search was necessary. one clue may come from a stunning new report in the washington post. fbi agents were looking for classified documents related to america s nuclear program. that s according to people familiar with the investigation. nbc news has not confirmed that report. this morning trump called it a hoax. one of his attorneys was asked about it on fox. she was not quite so explicit. is it your understanding there were not documents related to our nuclear capabilities or nuclear issues that had national security implications in the president s possession when the agents showed up at mar-a-lago? that s correct. do you know for a fact? have you spoken to the president about it? i have not specifically spoken to the president about what nuclear materials may or may not have been in there. i do not believe there were any in there. i want to bring in justice and intelligence correspondent ken dilanian. charles kohlman is a former prosecutor. carol l
to nuclear-related documents or any specificity at all about what these documents might be with. which is pretty much as i had expected. the fbi is not going describe classified documents, but what we re mainly learning here is confirmation of what we knew. there were classified documents, at least according to the fbi, that they found at mar-a-lago. now the former lawyers are going to argue and have been arguing that the president has inherent authority to declassify information. all this information presumably was declassified by president trump. but nbds has been consulting a multitude of experts on this point in recent days. they have said it s not clear that it works that way. that even with the president, there are certain procedures that have to be followed. at the very least, it has to be memorialized that the president declassified something. in the absence of any record that something was declassified, the presumption is it remains classified. i want to bring in charles.
so it will have a lot of information in it, including probably some hearsay and tips because they are in middle of the investigation, they are starting to review the documents taken from mar-a-lago, this would not be the time the justice department would want to make that information public. charles, we talk about the search warrant here. what is it that you re most interested to see once this is released. there s been a lot of conversation from the trump organization and people around them about sbrnl leaks and rats. i m going to be looking to see whether this gives insight as to where the documents were located in mar-a-lago. that s important for a couple reasons. when you re seeking to get a search warrant from a judge, you re suppose odd to particularly plead with great specificity where in the residence those items are located. mar-a-lago is huge property. you re not going to able to identify where those things are unless you have someone from the inside. i think the degree of
it doesn t. we should remember the washington post reported that fbi agents were seeking those documents. not that they found them. so that s an important distinction. and really all that kind of information what they were seeking and why they suspected that would be in the affidavit that unfortunately we re not seeing. but i think charles is on to the fundamental question here. which is this a case about something larger? is there something else going on here? the question of why donald trump was forwarding these documents and what he was doing? or a case of the justice department wanted their documents back. that s the question here. if it s the latter, it s possible no charges will be filed. they have the documents now. and then we ll have a debate about whether trump should have had them and could have declassified them. i was struck by something said on air earlier that president ooiz hour when he was writing his memoirs, he had go to an army facility every time he wanted to l
in there. i want to bring in justice and intelligence correspondent ken dilanian. charles kohlman is a former prosecutor. carol lam, is former attorney. and michael steele is former rnc chairman. ken, let s start with you. where do things stand? the question you have been asked about 500 times today, what will we see and won t we see when the judge release this is information? good afternoon, joe. as of this hour, the justice department still has not filed the document with the court. the notice to the judge to ask him to rule to unseal this. they have until 3:00 p.m. to do that. after that it can come at any time. in terms of what we will and won t see. a typical search warrant has three parts. one part is the affidavit of probable cause. that is the thing that the justice department is not asking to unseal. that includes the basis for the search. essentially, the fbi s justification to the judge that a crime was committed. that evidence of that crime is