Mar-a-Lago -and its owner -- have long caused concerns for US intelligence
Revealing an airstrike over "beautiful" chocolate cake. A trespasser from China carrying flash drives and electronics. Cellphone photos of the "nuclear football" briefcase. And now, classified documents recovered during an FBI search.
Mar-a-Lago, the stone-walled oceanfront estate Donald Trump labeled the "Winter White House," has long been a source of headaches for national security and intelligence professionals. Its clubby atmosphere, sprawling guest-list and talkative proprietor combined into a "nightmare" for keeping the government's most closely held secrets, one former intelligence official said.
Now, the 114-room mansion and its various outbuildings are at the center of a Justice Department investigation into Trump's handling of presidential material. After an hours-long search of the property last week, FBI agents seized 11 sets of documents, some marked as "sensitive compartmented information" — among the highest levels of government secrets.
Saturday that one of Trump's attorneys claimed in June that no classified material remained at the club -- raising fresh questions about the number of people who have legal exposure in the ongoing investigation
In many ways, Trump's 20-acre compound in Palm Beach, Florida, amounts to the physical embodiment of what some former aides describe as a haphazard-at-best approach by the former President to classified documents and information.
"Mar-a-Lago has been a porous place ever since Trump declared his candidacy and started winning primaries several years ago," said Aki Peritz, a former CIA counterterrorism analyst. "If you were any intelligence service, friendly or unfriendly, worth their salt, they would be concentrating their efforts on this incredibly porous place."
When Trump departed office in January 2021, it was Mar-a-Lago where he decamped, sore from a loss he refused to acknowledge. The club, with its paying members and large oil paintings of Trump as a younger man, was a welcome refuge.
It was also the destination for dozens of cardboard boxes, packed in haste in the final days of his administration and shipped in white trucks to Florida. People familiar with Trump's exit from Washington said the process of packing was rushed, in part because the outgoing President refused to engage in activities that would signal he'd lost the election. When it became clear he would need to leave the White House, items were quickly stowed away in boxes and shipped south without a clearly organized system.
Trump kept a lot of things in his files that were not in the regular system or that had been given to him in the course of intelligence briefings," said John Bolton, Trump's former national security adviser. "I can easily imagine in the last chaotic days at the White House, since he didn't think he was going to leave until the last minute, they were just throwing things in boxes, and it included a lot of things he had accumulated over the four years."
Some boxes, including some containing classified documents, had ended up at the club after Trump's presidency concluded. When federal investigators -- including the chief of counterintelligence and export control at the Justice Department -- traveled to Mar-a-Lago in June to discuss the classified documents with Trump and his lawyers, they voiced concern the room wasn't properly secured.
Trump's team added a new lock onto the door. But FBI agents returned to Mar-a-Lago last week to execute a search warrant on the property that identified three possible crime.
violations of the Espionage Act, obstruction of justice and criminal handling of government records.
The items taken away after Monday's search included a leather box of documents, binders of photos, "miscellaneous top secret documents" and "Info re. President of France," according to the search warrant. Trump and his allies have claimed he used his presidential prerogative to declassify the documents before leaving office, though haven't provided any evidence of a formal process taking place.
My only surprise was that there wasn't even more taken to Mar-a-Lago," Bolton said.
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