Such a decision “is not taken lightly,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said Thursday. He was referring to the search of Donald Trump’s mansion, a decision unprecedented in the history of the United States. And the pieces start to fit. As revealed on Thursday afternoon The Washington Post, FBI agents went to search Mar-a-Lago in search of secret documents on nuclear weapons that the former president would have taken there and had not returned after being required to do so.
The details, in reality, are still minimal. The sources of the newspaper in the US capital, who speak on condition of anonymity, do not clarify whether they were documents on the US nuclear arsenal or on the nuclear weapons of another country. They also do not explain whether the agents who searched Trump’s mansion for hours found what they were looking for. Neither the Department of Justice, nor the FBI nor Donald Trump have clarified the doubts. What is explained is that there was a fear that these documents were in danger of ending up in the wrong hands.
The search warrant might shed some light. The Department of Justice has filed a motion with the South Florida court to allow it to be made public, as well as some annexes and the receipt with the list of seized documentation. Garland’s office has not asked for the affidavit to be made public, the motivated petition to request the registry and that could confirm if it is true, as Newsweek revealed and later confirmed by other US media, that the information about the documentation that was still at home of Trump came from a tip presumably from someone close to him.
Trump has the possibility of making the search warrant and receipt public, but he has not done so now. And the prosecutor conditions the publication of it to the fact that the former president does not object. But refusing to do so will weaken the insistent requests for explanations that his followers have made.
In the petition to the judge to make the search warrant public, a five-page document, The Department of Justice argues that although it initially requested to keep the order and its annexes secret, now the search has already been executed, Trump has revealed that it has been carried out and his representatives have made public declarations of the materials sought. “The clear and powerful interest of the public in understanding what happened in these circumstances weighs heavily in favor of lifting the secret,” the letter concludes.
A prerequisite
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“My attorneys and representatives were fully cooperative and very good relationships had been established. The Government could have whatever it wanted, if we had it, ”Trump said this Thursday on his social network. The problem is that the National Archives had already contacted Trump to claim the documentation and a subsequent request had also been made and the FBI continued to suspect that Trump had not returned the papers, including those with secret content, and as revealed now The Washington Post, with information on nuclear weapons. Trump has not immediately reacted to the publication of that new information.
The political judgment on what happened, whether the search was a proportionate action or not, will depend a lot on what the result was. As much as the FBI had information from an informer and some presidential documents were finally found, if these were inconsequential it will be difficult to argue that the search of the house of a former president was justified. On the other hand, if secret documents have appeared in the registry that in one way or another affected national security, that were classified as confidential and that the former president kept in his possession after more than a year and a half out of office, flagrantly violating the law and after repeated efforts by the authorities to recover them, what will be very difficult to defend is their position.
As for the criminal procedure, it is another matter. The mere possession of those documents could already be considered a crime, according to US law. But deciding to formally accuse Trump and try to bring him to trial is a decision of much greater significance even than the search, which has already caused a tremendous political earthquake and has accentuated the political polarization that exists in the United States. It is, of course, another decision not to be taken lightly.
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