FBI probing Donald Trump under Espionage Act, unsealed warrant shows, as top secret files found at Mar-a-Lago
- Agents seized over 30 items, including classified documents, a pardon for Roger Stone and information about the ‘President of France’
- The Justice Department has used the Espionage Act in high-profile cases involving Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
FBI agents in this week’s search of former US president Donald Trump’s Florida home removed 11 sets of classified documents including some marked as top secret, the Justice Department said on Friday, while also disclosing it had probable cause to conduct the search based on possible Espionage Act violations.
The bombshell disclosures were made in a search warrant approved by a US magistrate judge and accompanying documents released four days after agents searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach. The Espionage Act, one of three laws cited in the warrant application, dates to 1917 and makes it a crime to release information that could harm national security.
Trump, in a statement on his social media platform, said the records were “all declassified” and placed in “secure storage”.
“They didn’t need to ‘seize’ anything. They could have had it anytime they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago,” the Republican businessman-turned-politician said.
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FBI raids former US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home
The search was carried out as part of a federal investigation into whether Trump illegally removed documents when he left office in January 2021 after losing the presidential election two months earlier to Democrat Joe Biden.