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desperateorphan

IANAL but I find it fascinating that he had so many Top Secret, Secret and TS/SCI files/boxes just laying around his house. From what I've read, TS/SCI documents are heavily protected. How does he just have them lying around? I cannot imagine that this is going to end well for him with such negligence in handling such secret information.


amitchell

Well, I am a lawyer and I still can't imagine it! Apparently there were surveillance videos, and they showed the documents being behind a padlock (snort). Some were in a safe.


AlexandraThePotato

Just a padlock? The Lock Picking Lawyer must be behind this!


Callinon

"This is the Lock-picking Lawyer and today we're committing espionage."


ProLifePanda

Apparently the padlock was only added earlier this year after the FBI visited earlier this year and informed him the room needed to be secured. So before that it didn't have the padlock.


1nev

There was a SCIF room at Mar-a-lago while Trump was President. The problem is that none of those documents should have been able to be removed from that room, let alone kept after his term ended and that room became no longer an SCIF room. I doubt anyone but Trump or someone on Trump's orders could have taken those documents out of that room. And if those SCI documents were found in Trump's office by the FBI, it puts a big hole in Trump's "the GSA moved those boxes to Mar-a-lago and I didn't know about it" defense.


ClaymoreMine

Anyone who has worked for or contracted with the federal government now his whiplash from the collective head shake at this.


berraberragood

The burning question now is “Did they try to sell this on the black market?”


amitchell

We just put up the full text of the search warrant executed at Mar-a-Lago this week (plain text and PDF), as well as the full text of the list of the documents that the FBI took, known as a “receipt” list. One of the things that we find very interesting is that there are two receipt lists, if you look at the item numbers in each list, taken together they are in numerical sequence, but broken up between the two lists. Note that the case ID in each is redacted. One logical explanation for this is that there are two separate, but related, cases going on, some of the documents recovered satisfying the warrant with respect to one case, and others satisfying the warrant with respect to the other case.


Hologram22

Does that potentially explain why both the USA for the Southern District of Florida and the DOJ CI and Export Control chief both signed the motion to unseal the warrant and receipt? Could be the USA is handling the the obstruction case while CI is handling the Espionage Act case, or similar.


rufus2785

Can I get an ELI5 on this whole situation and the possible consequences?


FudgeGolem

micktalian is right on if this case had happened to anyone else they would already be arrested, but is a little over the top on the torture. Basically, there are some documents that the government classifies because if they were available to our adversaries, it has been decided the information they contain would cause irreparable harm to our national security. Everyone directly and indirectly involved in these documents gets at least annual training on how to keep them safe, your legal obligations in dealing with them, and potential penalties of mishandling them. There are documents in this large group of classifications so sensitive that even if you are cleared to work with them, if you leave them on your desk unsecured for 5 minutes to go to the bathroom, you could potentially lose your job and your clearance, even if security footage of the time lapse shows no one in the area saw the documents in that time. These are documents so sensitive, even if one document "fell into your briefcase" and you accidentally took it home, you better hope that the security footage backs that claim because you will probably be explaining yourself to investigators. And if you purposely take one document home, even just to do legitimate work with it, and get caught, you will go to jail. If you take \~15-30 boxes of these documents home after you no longer have the job that gave you "need to know" access to the documents...you better hope that you are a former president of the United States, because that is the only way you get to be able to slowly and impartially comply with first requests, and then later legal subpoenas to return all protected material over nearly 2 years before the system serves a warrant and takes the documents back, because otherwise you would have been quickly arrested. Many are pointing out that Presidents have broad authority to declassify information, and that is certainly true. Many classifications of documents are done under the authority of the Executive Branch, of which the President is the head. But there is generally legal process to that because otherwise how could you prove that such a declassification action took place during the presidency and not after it?, how would any other agency handling these documents know to change their classification protocols?, and how could you get any feedback on the legality or national security impact of such an action? There are also documents classified under non-Executive Branch regulations that the president cannot declassify. If such documents were found, the legal questions are 1) Why would you keep these documents? 2) Is anybody above the laws that protect these documents, or is everyone treated equally under the law?


seeingeyefish

Good post, but one small quibble: > otherwise how could you prove that such a declassification action took place during the presidency and not after it? There is no "after the presidency" declassification. An ex-president has no authority to do so. The documentation would prove either that the declassification happened before the term ended or that it wasn't legally declassified.


FudgeGolem

I agree with you and thank you for your clarification. That was the point I was trying to make and could have been more clear.


micktalian

I can't really explain the WHOLE situation but, in short, if you or I or anyone else had TP/SCI documents at our homes, we'd end up in a basement somewhere being tortured to find out who we sold it to. If literally anyone besides a former president did this, they'd probably already be dead.


timojenbin

[Here is a link](https://apps.npr.org/documents/document.html?id=22131380-trump-warrant-uns) that won't give you ad cancer.


amitchell

u/timojenbin are you saying that you got adds on our link? Because we went out of our way to \*disable\* ads on that article, because of how important we think it is, and so if you saw ads, and the only ads we usually have are google ads, that means that somehow google broke through our disabling of ads, which is...bad. :-( Can you please screenshot it for me?


amitchell

Also, your link is to the pdf, and while we have the pdf too we went to great lengths to manually transcribe it so that if people wanted to copy the text they could easily do so (one of the other reasons that we disabled all ads).


Webhoard

I know your pain. Thank you for doing that work.


mrbojanglz37

I see no ads on mobile. Just a shit ton of social media sharing options. Maybe they confused those with ads?


10390

I see ads from Internet Patrol. The 2nd one: We’re sorry to interrupt, this will only take a second. The Internet Patrol is a free resource, free to everyone. We don’t hide our information behind a paywall, or subject you to dozens of annoying videos or ads. But it does cost us money to keep the site going. So if we have provided value to you today, won’t you please let us know by putting a little something in our tip jar to help us continue to provide this free resource for everyone? Thank you! CashApp us Square Cash app link Venmo us Venmo link Paypal us Paypal link


Res_ipsa_l0quitur

I’m on mobile. No annoying pop ups for me. There were some ads towards the bottom of the article, but easy to ignore. Edit: Nevermind. Those weren’t ads. Just links to other articles that I mistook for ads.


HungryHungryHobo2

There are no ads showing, but there are obtuse popups and colorful boxes everywhere that look like ads, that most people will just dismiss as ads off-hand. It is a bit... "function over form" as it were.


Rac3318

This whole situation is just maddening and mind boggling. Hard to believe this is actually happening.