A newly unsealed FBI document about the investigation at Mar-a-Lago not only offers new details about the probe but also reveals clues about the arguments former U.S. President Donald Trump's legal team intends to make.
A May 25 letter from one of his lawyers, attached as an exhibit to the search affidavit, advances a broad view of presidential power, asserting that the commander-in-chief has absolute authority to declassify whatever he wants -- and also that the "primary" law governing the handling of U.S. classified information simply doesn't apply to the president himself.
It's not clear from the affidavit whether Trump or anyone might face charges over the presence of classified records at Mar-a-Lago -- 19 months after he became a private citizen -- and FBI officials are investigating who removed the records from the White House to the Florida estate and who is responsible for retaining them in an unauthorized location.
Another law punishable by up to three years in prison makes it a crime to willfully remove, conceal or mutilate government records. And a third law, carrying up to 20 years imprisonment, covers the destruction, alteration or falsification of records in federal investigations. "There's no intelligence community directive that says how presidents should or shouldn't be briefed on the materials," said Larry Pfeiffer, a former CIA officer and senior director of the White House Situation Room. "We've never had to worry about it before."
The statute the letter cites, though, is not among the three that the search warrant lists as being part of the investigation. And the Espionage Act law at issue concerns "national defence" information rather than "classified," suggesting it may be irrelevant whether the records were declassified or not.
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