With help from Lee Hudson and Connor O’Brien
Forgive the pun, but the Washington Post dropped a bomb last night: “A document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities, was found by FBI agents who searched former president DONALD TRUMP’s Mar-a-Lago residence and private club last month.”
Per DEVLIN BARRETT and CAROL LEONNIG, the document about a country’s “nuclear-defense readiness” came into the government possession through a court-approved search on Aug. 8.
Importantly, military defenses + nuclear-defense readiness ≠ one of the nine countries known to have nuclear weapons. It’s possible that the sensitive intelligence was about a country’s ability to withstand a nuclear attack or ability to protect its burgeoning nuclear program. If that’s the case, a country like Iran would fit the bill.
That hasn’t stopped the D.C. commentariat from speculating wildly on which country had their secrets strewn about Trump’s club.
It’s North Korea, so goes one theory, because Trump was deep into nuclear negotiations with KIM JONG UN and liked to show his “love letters” to the dictator. It’s Israel, because Trump has shared the country’s most secret information before. It’s Iran, actually, because the president surely received constant updates about its nuclear work following America’s withdrawal from the 2015 deal.
At this point, all anyone has is a guess — except, of course, for the government officials who have recently reviewed the document. “We still have more questions than answers on exactly what’s in those documents,” said ERIC BREWER, senior director of the Nuclear Materials Security program at the Nuclear Threat Initiative. “The range of issues and countries that could fit in the nuclear bin is so large that it is kind of useless to speculate without further information.”
An official for one of the nuclear-armed states didn’t seem that worried about the news. “We really have no clue what the document might be about and we haven’t sought anything about this from the Biden administration,” the person texted NatSec Daily.
A risk assessment of Trump’s removal of highly classified documents is underway by the office of the Director of National Intelligence AVRIL HAINES.
Meanwhile, Trump’s defenders say he had the complete authority to declassify the materials and/or that the scandal amounts to no more than a storage issue, adding that the government is leaking classified information to the press.
But Sen. MARK WARNER (D-Va.), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, isn’t buying it. “I don’t know in what world that makes any legal, rational, or intelligence sense,” he said today.