On Thursday, Donald Trump became the first former president in U.S. history to face federal criminal charges when a grand jury in Florida indicted him and a close aide on 38 separate counts over his handling of classified information, including willfully retaining national defense secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, conspiracy to obstruct justice and making false statements.
Trump reacted to the federal charges, brought by prosecutors from special counsel Jack Smith’s office, by announcing in a four-minute video, “I’m an innocent man. I’m an innocent person.” Trump will, of course, have his day in court. Some close observers, however, could see this day coming. I stressed in a column more than a year ago that nothing less than a full-blown inquiry is due.
The indictment was released Friday afternoon. It is a damning account, to Trump first and foremost but not only to Trump.
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The FBI should have been on the ground at Mar-a-Lago the very day in early February 2022 that the National Archives advised the Justice Department that it had identified classified national security information in 15 boxes at Trump’s private estate. Instead, the feds tarried in pursuit of other spirited-away classified materials at Mar-a-Lago. That pursuit didn’t come to fruition until seven months later, when the FBI, armed with a search warrant for Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, seized about 13,000 documents, 103 of them classified and 18 of them top secret.
Follow this authorColbert I. King's opinionsThe documents recovered by the National Archives more than a year after the end of the Trump administration and others subsequently retrieved seven months later by the FBI were so sensitive that, with respect to the top-secret materials, unauthorized disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause, by definition, “exceptionally grave damage” to national security.
My interest in the discovery wasn’t limited to covering Trump as a journalistic pastime.
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Protecting U.S. classified information was a duty I performed for years in Washington and in Europe when the Cold War was rather heated. And it was not done from the vantage point of a top-floor government office but at the ground level. You vetted those who would be trusted with national security documents, and you maintained safeguards to prevent unauthorized disclosures — the very circumstances we face with the discovery of secrets in Trump’s home.
To be clear, federal authorities didn’t come upon extraneous, inconsequential restricted materials. They seized “classified TS/SCI documents” — or sensitive compartmented information. These materials are so sensitive that they require separate handling, including a formal determination of who may have access to them, where those materials can be even discussed, and the kind of facility in which they can be stored. I have more than a theoretical familiarity with these requirements.
In court papers last year, prosecutors indicated they were scrutinizing the legality of Trump’s actions: whether he broke laws governing the handling of national security documents and whether he obstructed U.S. government efforts to retrieve them. Now we learn their findings: Trump is a criminal defendant who will appear in federal court at 3 p.m. Tuesday in Miami for an arraignment.
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A chilling paragraph from the indictment: “The classified documents Trump stored ... included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to foreign attack. The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.”
What might never be made public but what the intelligence community and congressional leaders need is a clear-eyed assessment of the potential damage to national security if critical materials handled at Mar-a-Lago, or anywhere else, were improperly disclosed — intentionally, carelessly or otherwise. Who had access to those materials? Has highly sensitive information taken from the White House indeed been compromised?
Trump, to be sure, has other things on his mind besides the classified-documents investigation and his presidential race. There’s the special counsel’s separate probe into the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. And Trump’s indictment by a New York prosecutor in a hush money case. And the investigation by a Georgia prosecutor over attempts to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in that state.
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But the former commander in chief’s treatment of information critical to our nation’s security is as it should be: a preeminent U.S. concern. The Justice Department had to investigate the facts and circumstances surrounding possible federal criminal violations and then make the unprecedented prosecutorial decision to indict a former chief executive of the United States. Trump, by virtue of his alleged deeds, left them no choice.
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