operatives who defected from the kremlin s secret service agency. plus, a veteran las vegas investigative reporter found stabbed to death outside his home. the move today that may put police one step closer to his killer. welcome to the lead. i m jake tapper. we start today with our politics lead, and striking new details about what exactly donald trump took to mar-a-lago. one of the documents that fbi agents recovered during their search of the florida resort described a foreign government s nuclear capabilities. that s according to the washington post, which goes on to say, quote, some of the seized documents detail top secret u.s. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them, unquote. donald trump s lawyers once again trying to deflect from any serious national security implications here. instead, decrying what they described as leaks about the investigation, which one might observe is a curious time to
mixed in with a mess of whole other stuff. i find that odd. some kind affjunk drawer happening because, look, some of the nation s most important secrets potentially and again we don t know what is in these documents. we still don t know. we know the type of document, the classification. bullet the fact a document of this potential could be mixed in with clothes and gifts and press clippings, do you see possibly an innocent explanation interest this? let s think about a benefit of the doubt. can one be extended? not at all. i mean there is absolutely no good reason for donald trump to have taken any of this. i mean, there s no justification for why he d have to use it. i mean it just these are documents that belong to the government. they should have been left behind. he has not come up with any justification as to why he had the right to have these documents. he claimed at one point recently that he declassified them. but he never made that argument in the course of,
in a storage room. this december despite one of his lawyers telling the government they ve given everything back before that search. now agents found government documents mixed in with personal items like gifts and clothing. there are also dozens of empty folders that were marked as classified. i want to bring in cnn s sara murray, political analyst laura barone lopez, and nick akerman, and also we have national security attorney bradley moss. a great panel to talk about this very important issue. i want to begin with you here, sara. you ve been going through the inventory documents from this mar-a-lago search. tell me what is standing out to you? well, i mean, certainly it s the volume. they say there are 11,000 government documents that are not classified. but also, when you dig in to the classified documents you, have you 103 documents. we re now learning that amounts to hundreds of pages in these documents. but 18 of those are top secret. 54 are secret. 31 are confident
your office someplace that s empty. this is not the typical case or office drawer for most people. we re talking about mar-a-lago, a former president, top secret information. the fact there are empty files does that mean nothing was in them to begin with, they re being recycled? or does it mean that maybe information of a top secret nature could actually be missing now and unaccounted for? yes, so that s certainly one of the unresolved questions here. and obviously i believe that s something the fbi would like to know is what was originally in there and when. it certainly could be the case when they were packing up the white house and moved everything to mar-a-lago, they just stuffed things into these folders that had nothing to do with classified information that they may have previously been used in that matter. bullet that s an unresolved issue that has to be clarified. donald trump s a notorious pack rat. he likes souvenirs. he thinks it s cool. he thinks it s stuff he has he
just begs the question as to why. why fight so hard for these documents? but i do want to point out. there are some empty folders in here. empty folders that are marked classified. and i don t know about you, but you probably have manila folders somewhere in your office, some place that s empty. this is not the typical case or office drawer most people are talking about. mar-a-lago, top secret classification. does that mean nothing was in them to begin with, they re being recycled? or does it mean maybe information of a top secret nature could actually be missing now and unaccounted for? yes, so that s certainly one of the unresolved questions here. and obviously i believe that s something the fbi would like to know is what was originally in there and when. it certainly could be the case that when they were packing up the white house to move everything to mar-a-lago, they just stuffed things into these folders that had nothing to do with classified information that they have previous