Warrant reveals Donald Trump under investigation for potential violations of Espionage Act

According to a search warrant made public on Friday, former US President Donald Trump is being investigated for possible violations of the Espionage Act and other laws. The warrant revealed that FBI agents seized top secret documents during a raid on his home in Florida on Monday.

According to the written inventory of material seized that was released on Friday in response to a court order, FBI agents seized 11 sets of documents in total, four of which were labelled “classified/TS/SCI” — shorthand for “top secret/sensitive compartmented information.” Agents also took three sets of documents classified as secret and three sets of confidential papers.

The inventory did not specify the exact subject matter of the material seized, but documents marked TS/SCO are typically meant to be viewed only in a secure government facility and should not be removed. Some sections of the US media reported that some of the material was related to nuclear weapons, but the inventory provided no information on this.

Meanwhile, Trump, after initially suggesting that the FBI may have planted evidence during the raid, claimed that all of the material had been declassified and that the FBI did not need to “seize” anything. “They could have had it whenever they wanted without playing politics…ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS ASK,” he said in a post on his social media platform Truth Social, pivoting to ask what the FBI was doing with the 33 million pages, many of which he claimed were classified, that President Obama took when he left office.

The National Archives quickly countered Trump’s charges saying it maintained “exclusive legal and physical custody” of Obama’s records stored in a Archives facility in Chicago, but Trump and his cohorts continued to maintain that different standard were being applied to Democrats.

The Justice Department has also indicated it gave Trump plenty of time and opportunities to return the documents before initiating the raid, which it intended not to make public, but was revealed by Trump himself.

Threats of violence against the Justice Department and FBI have been made by pro-Trump right wing extremists, and cries of treason have been made by Trump critics who have long said he is unfit for office and cannot be trusted to keep secrets.

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss referred to a famous espionage case in a tweet on Thursday, saying, without mentioning Trump, “Rosenbergs were convicted for giving US nuclear secrets to Moscow, and were executed June 1953.” Among the comments was one from former CIA Director Michael Hayden, a harsh critic of Trump, who said, “Sounds about right.”

Sounds about right. https://t.co/hJCjxhN2BQ

— Gen Michael Hayden (@GenMhayden) August 12, 2022

Among the trending hashtags related to the development was “TRE45ON,” a charge frequently levelled by Trump critics against America’s 45th President.

Ricky Shiffer, a former US Navy veteran who served on a submarine, was shot dead by authorities on Thursday after attempting to breach an FBI field office in Ohio. Shiffer’s social media posts expressed his outrage at the Mar-a-lago raid, urging a violent response against the FBI.