FBI agents were looking for secret documents about nuclear weapons among other classified material when they searched former US president Donald Trump’s Florida home on Monday, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.
The newspaper cited people familiar with the investigation as saying that nuclear weapons documents were thought to be in the trove the FBI was hunting in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
They did not specify what kind of documents, or whether they referred to the US arsenal or another country’s.
Photo: AP
The report came hours after US Attorney General Merrick Garland said he had personally authorized the US government request for a search warrant and revealed that the US Department of Justice had asked a Florida court for the warrant to be unsealed.
Trump, who first revealed the search at his resort on social media, late on Thursday called for the release of the warrant, saying: “Not only will I not oppose the release of documents ... I am going a step further by encouraging the immediate release of those documents.”
The search was “unAmerican, unwarranted and unnecessary,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.
The justice department motion referred to “the public’s clear and powerful interest in understanding what occurred in its contents.”
Garland’s announcement followed a furious backlash to the search from Trump supporters who portrayed it as politically motivated.
On Thursday, a man who tried to breach an FBI office in Cincinnati, Ohio, was shot and killed by police after he fled the scene.
The court told the government to present its motion to Trump’s lawyers and to report back by 3pm yesterday on whether Trump objected to the warrant being unsealed.
The suspected presence of nuclear weapons documents at Mar-a-Lago could explain why Garland took such a politically charged step as ordering FBI agents into a former president’s house, as retrieving them would be seen as a national security priority.
Trump was particularly fixated on the US nuclear arsenal while he was in the White House and boasted about being privy to highly secret information.
In 2017, he told US military leaders that he wanted an arsenal comparable to its Cold War peak, which would have involved a 10-fold increase, a demand that reportedly led then-US secretary of state Rex Tillerson to describe Trump as a “fucking moron.”
Trump publicly threatened to obliterate North Korea and Afghanistan.
In a book on the Trump presidency titled Rage, veteran journalist Bob Woodward quoted the former president as telling him: “We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about.
“We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before. There’s nobody. What we have is incredible,” Trump told Woodward, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
Woodward said he was later told the US did indeed have an unspecified new weapons system, and officials were “surprised” that Trump had disclosed the fact.
Cheryl Rofer, a chemist who worked on nuclear weapons at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said there were varying classification levels applying to different kinds of documentation.
“Information about the design of nuclear weapons is called ‘restricted data’ and is born classified. That means it is assumed to be classified unless declassified,” Rofer, who writes a blog titled Nuclear Diner, wrote on Twitter.
“There’s no reason for a president to have nuclear weapons design information that I can see,” she added.
Among the nuclear documents that Trump would routinely have had access to would be the classified version of the Nuclear Posture Review, which is about US capabilities and policies.
A military aide is always close to the president carrying the “nuclear football,” a briefcase containing nuclear strike options, but it would be unusual for those documents to be taken out of the football.
Another possibility Rofer pointed to is that Trump could have retained his nuclear “biscuit,” a piece of plastic similar to a credit card with the identification codes necessary for nuclear launch.
However, those codes would have been changed the moment US President Joe Biden took office at noon on Jan. 20 last year.
Additional reporting by AP
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