MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

WaPo: Trump took home secret documents on Iran and China

Trump could be charged with violating the Espionage Act

Highly classified intelligence documents on Iran and China were retrieved from the raid on former US President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence in August in Palm Beach, Florida, the Washington Post reported Friday.

The documents included data regarding Iran’s missile program and US highly sensitive intelligence work directed at China,” the newspaper underlined.

“If shared with others, such information could expose intelligence-gathering methods that the United States wants to keep hidden from the world,” the report pointed out.

Investigators seized tens of thousands of documents -including some 100 deemed highly classified and 18 of them top secret- that should have reportedly remained in US archives, but which Trump illegally took home upon leaving the White House in January 2021.

These papers were found in Trump's personal office and were seized on national security grounds. The former head of state is thus suspected of violating the Espionage Act, which bans the possession of highly confidential documents related to national defense.

US intelligence believes Tehran is close to having enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon but has not proven it conclusively.

Some of the seized documents detail top-secret US operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are not informed about them, the Post said. Only the president and some Cabinet members have access to these papers.

A former senior Justice Department official told the Post that the reckless exposure of invaluable sources and methods of US intelligence capabilities might influence the agency’s determination on whether to charge Trump or others for the withholding of national defense data.

Trump is believed not to have turned over all the classified material in his possession, although he insists his actions were legal. “If you’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it’s declassified. You’re the president — you make that decision,” he told Fox News in a recent interview.

“Who could ever trust corrupt, weaponized agencies, and that includes NARA…Also, who knows what NARA and the FBI plant into documents, or subtract from documents—we will never know, will we?” Trump said on social media.