The American justice published, Friday August 26, a legal document setting out the reasons for the recent search of the federal police (FBI) at the Florida home of Donald Trump. Federal judge Bruce Reinhart had imposed on the Department of Justice to make public this key document, supposed to detail the reasons which led to investigate the former American president. It was, according to him, the interest of the public for this search.
On one condition, to hide important parts of the document in the name of a need “imperious” to protect the investigations. The authorities waited until the last minute, publishing the 38-page document shortly after 12 p.m. (6 p.m. in Paris), the deadline imposed by the judge. Investigators were particularly concerned about the maintenance in an unsecured room of potentially “top secret” documents, even potentially endangering US intelligence agents under cover.
Without delivering explosive revelations due to the many redacted passages, this pleading offers an overview of how Donald Trump kept potentially ultra-confidential documents at his home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
The document made public explains that the investigations began after the National Archives Agency (NARA), responsible for recording presidential activities, indicated in February to the Ministry of Justice that it had received, from Donald Trump’s teams, 15 boxes of documents containing in particular “top secret documents”.
The investigation then opened by the federal police made it possible to confirm that these boxes contained 184 classified documents, including 25 classified “top secret”, and led the investigators to believe that “other documents containing top secret national defense information” were still present at Mar-a-Lago.
Problem: these highly sensitive archives had no “not appropriately managed or stored in an appropriate place”detailed the Ministry of Justice in a letter to Donald Trump’s lawyers.
Donald Trump has again denounced, on his Truth Social network, a “witch hunt”and a “com subterfuge”noting that these court documents did not mention “nothing” potential documents relating to the “nuclear” mentioned for a time in the American press. “We live in a country without faith or law”he had been indignant shortly before.
On Monday, the former US president called for an independent expert to be appointed to examine the documents seized by the FBI and determine which ones could keep “confidential” and thus not be used in investigations.