Former president Donald Trump reportedly stashed away nuclear secrets in his Florida residence among a trove of highly classified documents for 18 months since leaving the White House.
Experts and former intelligence officials have warned the Florida estate Mar-a-Lago is a magnet for foreign spies.
They are saying that so much damage may have been done.
A document describing an unspecified foreign government’s defenses, including its nuclear capabilities, was one of the many highly secret papers Trump took with him to his private home as he left the White House in January 2021.
There were also documents marked SAP, for Special Access Programs, which are often about US intelligence operations and whose circulation is severely restricted, even among administration officials with top security clearances.
There were also papers stamped HCS, Humint Control Systems, involving human intelligence gathered from agents in enemy countries. Their lives would be in danger if their identities were compromised, making the fact Trump held onto these some of the most dangerous and most disturbing of the files he took.
How much damage has been done is being determined.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is conducting a damage assessment review which is focused on the sensitivity of the documents. But U.S. officials said it is the job of FBI counter-intelligence to assess who may have gained access to them.
That is a wide field.
The home of the former president, who has a history of being enthralled by foreign autocrats and is distrustful of US security services, frequently boasts about his knowledge of secrets. Trump is an obvious foreign intelligence target, and so too is his beloved Florida estate.
Former CIA director John Brennan said national security professionals are ‘shaking their heads at what damage might have been done.’
‘I’m sure Mar-a-Lago was being targeted by Russian intelligence and other intelligence services over the course of the last 18 or 20 months, and if they were able to get individuals into that facility, and access those rooms where those documents were and made copies of those documents, that’s what they would do,’ Brennan said.
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