we have gotten copies of those supporting affidavits. but years after the prosecution ended. let s talk about the level of classification. i was just talking to sadie about that. there were different things in their. and the warrant specifically asked for different things in their. what do they mean? for our purposes, whether something is top secret or classified or compartmented are these distinctions relevant to us? or is it all bad? no they are important distinctions. now the first thing to understand is, under the espionage act, which is one of the statutes that could be at play, that act goes back over a century. it talks about national defence information because it was written before we have the courage classification status and framework. now that means, actually the information doesn t even have to be classified, although i do not know of any recent prosecutions under the act where the information was not and i dare say, i can t imagine the justice department would go
these distinctions relevant to us? or is it all bad? no they are important distinctions. now the first thing to understand is, under the espionage act, which is one of the statutes that could be at play, that act goes back over a century. it talks about national defence information because it was written before we have the courage classification status and framework. now that means, actually the information doesn t even have to be classified, although i do not know of any recent prosecutions under the act where the information was not and i dare say, i can t imagine the justice department would go after the president for unclassified information under the espionage act but the executive order that sets forth different levels of classification confidential secret top secret then sci which you mentioned if you think of an offshoot of ts could also be under secret or a sap witch is special access programs those pertain to the levels of harm by definition that would because of the
information. not everyone has a topsecret clearance can see every bit of information that s in the compartment. those markings are on the documents. even the president s daily brief itself which is a stylist production he often in the fancy leather notebook still has topsecret stamped on it just to make sure that you know it s classified. there is no area for confusion here. who controls the controls on the limits on the various types of documents? i m asking you this obviously in the context that there are some people arguing, who made the case, that the president declassified the information. he s also made references to that. what is the process somewhat would ve had to have happen? is it just something that he could just? the president cannot retroactively declassify something let s take that off the table. if the argument is, he declassified these while i was president and i don t tell anyone, that does not hold up.
leave and you cannot convey any of that information to anybody. i lost congressman sorry, i lost you going into those compartmented places, you can do anything but that information, you connect conveyed, you cannot photographic, you cannot text, you cannot do anything with it. that is exactly right. and what happened to david petraeus, an american patriot, a general director of the cia, when it turned out he had shared classified information with a relationship of his, he was guilty ultimately of a misdemeanor, he step down as director of the cia. there have been a number of cases a very senior officials, including former directors of the cia, i m thinking of director deutch, who got in a lot of trouble because, even though they have these positions, if you access documents outside of these facilities, you have committed
mention informant. you and your colleagues of reported that the justice department was made aware of this trench of documents by a person familiar with the matter. what, if anything, do we know about this? we know very little about this person or who it is. but what we do know is that the information that this person provided prosecutors was in part what led to the search. it was in part what led to giving the government enough information it needed to form the basis for its search warrant which was approved on friday as we learned today. and so we think that this person played a significant role in the investigation. but we think that there are a number of different things that we still need to learn about how the government was able to put this together and what led them to believe that there was more classified information at mar-a-lago sadie gurman, thank you for your reporting and reporting for your team at the wall street journal. we appreciate your time tonight. thank you.