One of the top-secret documents seized by the FBI at the residence of former US President Donald Trump described the nuclear and military defense capabilities of a foreign power, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.
The media, which cites anonymous sources with knowledge of the case, points out that some of the documents found in Trump’s mansion in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, had such a high confidentiality reserve that only the president and cabinet officials or close to him they could authorize other members of the government to read them.
One of the documents seized by the FBI spoke of the nuclear capacity of a foreign power – Credits: @Jon Elswick
The newspaper does not mention the country whose defense and nuclear capacity were cited in the documents.
According to the Post, content like that required special permissions on a need-to-know basis, rather than a generic permission labeled “top secret.” Faced with this discovery, the former president of the United States faces increasing legal pressure.
The Department of Justice maintains that these documents “were probably hidden” to obstruct an FBI investigation into the possible mishandling of classified materials by Trump, who served in the US Executive until January 2021.
When agents searched the Mar-a-Lago mansion they found material so sensitive that “even FBI counterintelligence personnel and Justice Department attorneys conducting the review required additional authorizations to review certain documents,” a court filing said.
The FBI raid in August came after a review of “highly classified” records that Trump finally turned over to authorities in January after months of back-and-forth with the National Archives and Records Administration.
A page from the inventory of documents seized from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence by the FBI
The 15 boxes seized from the former president’s home were found to contain 184 documents marked confidential, secret or top secret. After receiving direction from the FBI, Trump’s attorney turned over 38 additional classified documents and provided an affidavit.
However, the FBI uncovered “multiple sources of evidence” showing that the classified documents remained at Mar-a-Lago.
Donald Trump and his obsession with nuclear weapons
According to a reconstruction made by The Guardian, the referent of the Republican Party boasted on several occasions of having a “particular taste” for this type of weaponry. In the summer of 2017 he told military leaders that he wanted to build an arsenal comparable to the one his government had in the Cold War. The initiative would have involved increasing the US defense budget tenfold.
In Rage (“Rage”), the book based on the Trump presidency written by Bob Woodward -one of the journalists who was involved in the investigation of the Watergate case-, it was learned that the former head of state publicly threatened to annihilate both North Korea as well as Afghanistan. “We have things that have never been seen and that [Vladimir] Putin and Xi [Jinping] have never heard of. No one else has them, what we have is incredible,” Trump said.
A gust of wind catches former President Donald Trump’s hair as he briefly removes his red cap
Among the information to which he had access during his mandate between 2017 and 2021 would be the classified version of the Nuclear Posture Review, based on the capabilities and policies of the United States regarding the use of weapons of that caliber and under what contexts it would be permitted.
There is also speculation that the businessman may have kept his nuclear “cookie”, a piece of plastic the size of a credit card with the identification codes necessary for the nuclear launch. However, those codes would have been changed by the time Biden took office.