Intelligence officers will scour the sensitive documents seized from Donald Trump’s Florida resort this month to see if national security might have been compromised.
Avril Haines, the US Director of National Intelligence, has told members of Congress that her office will lead a review into what FBI agents took from Mar-a-Lago as part of their investigation into whether the former president broke the law in his handling of those documents.
Meanwhile, government lawyers have until Tuesday to give a fuller account to the courts of what they actually recovered in the search, as both sides gear up for another week of legal proceedings.
In her letter, which was first reported by Politico and has been seen by the Financial Times, Haines said: “the Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence are working together to facilitate a classification review of relevant materials, including those recovered during the search.”
She added that her office would “lead an Intelligence Community assessment of the potential risk to national security that would result from the disclosure of the relevant documents.”
The letter was welcomed by Democratic leaders in Congress. In a joint statement, Adam Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and Carolyn Maloney, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, said: “It is critical that the [intelligence community] move swiftly to assess and, if necessary, to mitigate the damage done.”
The justice department on Friday released portions of the affidavit which underpinned the August 8 search of Mar-a-Lago.
The document gave little sense of what was contained in the files retrieved during the raid, but it did shed light on the 15 boxes of material which Trump returned to the government in January.
According to the filing, those boxes included 184 classified documents, of which 25 were marked top secret. They included markings which suggested they contained information about human intelligence sources and intercepted communications.
Democrats said the affidavit showed how serious the accusations being made against the former president were, while some Republicans have also agreed.
Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republicans who sits on the House committee investigating last year’s attack on the US Capitol, told NBC News on Sunday: “This is disgusting in my mind. And no president should act this way, obviously.”
Government lawyers have until Tuesday to give fuller information to the courts about what they found during the raid this month, after a judge ruled on Saturday they had to be more forthcoming about what they seized and who had reviewed it.
The judge, Aileen Cannon, who was appointed by Trump, said in her ruling that the justice department should file a fuller receipt of the documents under seal so it would not be publicly accessible.
She added that she intended to accept the former president’s request to appoint an independent official to review the documents as well. But she will make her final decision after a full hearing on the matter on Thursday.
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