government had established probable cause of potential violation of three federal statutes. number one relates to the unlawful removal of government material. number two relates to the law prohibiting the destruction or concealment of documents to obstruct an investigation. number three, potentially the most explosive, the espionage act. the inventory of what the fbi seized includes around 20 boxes of items including four sets of top-secret documents, three sets of secret documents, and three sets of confidential documents. the list does not provide any more details about the substance of those documents or what might be in them. in addition, there was binders of photos, signatures of the former president, executive grant of clemency for roger stone and my personal favorite quote, info. re the president of france. can t wait to find out what that is. the vagueness of that inventory will leave people wondering exactly what exactly is in those boxes. there will be room for sp
that should be shared with any president. i mean, as it is, it is being revealed that over the period of the presidency, that the intelligence community was very cautious in terms of what was provided to the president and when. we can remember from the early days, i think it was later during the 2016 campaign when president trump had briefings that every presidential candidate and nominee was entitled to. there was a lot of skepticism about him dangling the prospect of sharing intelligence information. now, we have confirmed by the search warrant that he was a security risk. he carted out dozens and dozens of boxes of documents that he should not have to mar-a-lago
documents that they were looking for were actually recovered in the search. what we now know this afternoon because we see the inventory and the search warrant is is, you know, there were four boxes of documents that were marked at this highest classification level. we, of course, don t know in any sort of detail what those documents contained, what they were about, whether or not they did pertain to nuclear programs. that s not spelled out in the court papers that we re all able to see publicly. we never expected they would be spelled out in those court papers in part because of the sensitivity of the matter. we stand by our reporting from last night which is based on rigorous beat reporting that the fbi when they went to mar-a-lago to conduct the search on monday were looking in part for classified documents pertaining to nuclear weapons. phil, i just i ll say i did not mean to disrespect your colleagues. here s the reality, like you re
that doesn t get him out from under any of the legal he s under, right. but i think secondly, i made the point that he is making a claim there that he didn t just declassify these documents, but i think based on what s in these documents he would have to be declassifying underlying ways this which the information in the documents was obtained. and that leads me to the point that there s no way that donald trump went through the normal protocols of declassifying these documents and whatever programs are described within these documents on the way out the door. i don t think any of us believe that he did that. he s using a postfacto justification to say, yeah, i actually declassified that. that s not how it works. you have to go through a protocol of declassification and review what is being declassified by taking a certain document. i would add we re going to hear contradictory things. we ve gone through the cycles of denial, first that there was nothing there, then that there was pla
top secret, things that are secret, and things that are confidential, that those are all that ought to prima fascia basis, we know i shouldn t say we know, we can conclude that if those things are properly marked that donald trump s violated the most bake of those three federal laws already? you re absolutely right. you don t have to go there. these three crimes that are isolated in the warrant don t actually require classification. they just require defense information. and there are two sections of espionage act 793 dmf which cover people who actually did have the authority to have these documents, and it bars them from mishandling that even if they had the authority at one point. you know, there s so many problems with this whole president automatically declassify the documents, i don t know where to begin. i mean, one is he didn t go through the proper procedures for doing so, and the court of appeals said even presidents are bound by those procedures.