is to inform a trump going to judge, aileen cannon, to use a special master to review all of the documents taken from mar-a-lago. the judges order put a temporary halt on the fbi s criminal investigation, but it weirdly permitted the odni s damage assessment to continue unimpeded. or at least that was the judges intent. but that s not how it works in reality. here is how former cia officer david priess sees that, according to the wall street journal. quote, it is a past difficult and more likely impossible to do a meaningful odni damage assessment while the fbi investigation is stalled. odni needs to know what documents were at mar-a-lago and who may have looked at them, priess said. that information is coming from the investigation by the fbi. the odni assessments operating in a vacuum without information from an active investigation of who had access to those documents. so this complicated ruling from the trump appointed judge could likely hamper not just a criminal investigation int
He held on to this information despite a subpoena demanding he turn over every classified document in his possession, and a signed statement from his attorney claiming he’d done so.
surrender on thursday. bannon has called the charges phoney. he also in a statement said that this is nothing more than a partisan political weaponization of the criminal justice system. these new state charges come just two months after bannon was convicted in washington, d.c. on federal charges of contempt of congress for failing to comply with a subpoena from the house select committee investigating january 6th. john and brianna. kara, thank you for that reporting. so major development this morning in the investigation into the documents marked classified taken from mar-a-lago. the washington post reports that, quote, a document describing a foreign government s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities, was found by fbi agents who searched former president donald trump s mar-a-lago residence and private club last month. with us now is david priess former cia author and author of the president s book of secrets.
they should be able to find someone who can do this and the request he is which of these saps do they need to be read into to even look at these classified documents which inherently are not subject to executive privilege or attorney/client privilege. we can just put that aside, but the special master in theory would look at all of them and would need to be read into some of these very fightly held compartments. david, in the doj filing it made last week one of the things things it said in its filing was that they had retrieved documents that even its own agents did not have clearance to look at. they had a hard time finding people who could look at some of the documents they obtained. does that filing now with this reporting, does that overlap in a way that makes sense to you? it does make sense. it s also not entirely clear from the reporting, john, that the special access programs were limited to this document or these documents specifically related to the other country nuclear
to find that out right now while other issues are going on involving a special master. traditionally these special access compartments, the saps as they are abbreviated, these are signed agreements that people have, you know how many people are in them, you know when those documents move and have new people added to the compartment or dropped from the compartment. it makes it much easier to do an investigation if you are allowed to do that investigation. the rules might be different for the president, however, because we don t know how paper moved in the white house, whether it moved in the way that it traditionally does in an administration or whether people like the staff secretary, the executive secretary, the national security council followed traditional rules for tracking paper. that s all information that should be part of the investigation and we hope very soon it is. when you are talking about secrets involving a country s nuclear capabilities, david, how much does it matter