This document-by-document review has allowed the agencies to determine whether any immediate efforts are needed to protect sources and methods as a result of the documents being held at former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence and resort, they said. the sources The National Archives provided the FBI access in mid-May to the 15 boxes it recovered from Mar-a-Lago in January, the bureau began providing copies of the relevant documents to the intelligence agencies of individual US to assess whether those containing classified marks were in fact. classified, and allowing the agencies in possession of the sensitive information to informally determine whether disclosure of the material could put sensitive sources at risk. That effort was conducted as part of the Justice Department investigation that led to the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago earlier this month. Under pressure from Congress, the director of national intelligence notified key lawmakers on Friday that her office, which oversees intelligence. agencies, will also conduct a formal damages assessment of any potential damages that could result from the disclosure of the documents. While individual agencies have had a window into some of those recovered from Mar-a-Lago, assessments like those released by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines are designed to provide a broader analytical picture of the short and long term risks. to US national security should this information be exposed, rather than addressing any immediate operational risk.
Spokesmen for the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA and the National Security Agency declined to comment.
For now, the risk posed by Trump storing secret documents at his Palm Beach, Florida, compound remains purely theoretical. It is not publicly known who may have accessed or seen any of the classified materials contained in the boxes recovered by the Archives and the FBI, or what the documents themselves reveal.
But current and former US officials have sounded the alarm about the potential danger of the highly insecure storage of these highly sensitive documents, and top US lawmakers have pressed the intelligence community to detail the who knows about the consequences.
There are multiple concerns for intelligence officials, including that secret US programs could have been exposed. There are also concerns that the sensitive ways in which the U.S. government collects classified information, including human sources, overseas wiretapping and other technical platforms such as satellites, could have been exposed to the wrong eyes and put to waste. Of particular concern is the possibility that a human source may be in physical danger if their identity is revealed to an adversary government.
Formal damage assessments like the one announced by Haines are designed not only to uncover any immediate harm from the exposure of classified information, but also to analyze the long-term risks if that information were to become public, according to Brian Greer, a former CIA lawyer specializing in national security investigations. For example, such a review could look at whether there are any foreign policy concerns for the US if certain classified information is disclosed.
That’s different, Greer said, than the kind of case-by-case review done by each agency’s relevant operating units that are geared toward immediate harm mitigation.
“It makes sense to me that this has been happening since the FBI identified these documents,” Greer said. “These risk mitigation efforts are different from a formal assessment, which will be analytical in nature and consider not only immediate harm, but also long-term harm: it is both concrete and theoretical.”
According to Greer, there are some potential risks to conducting a full damage assessment: in particular, that it could interfere with any criminal prosecution the Justice Department may decide to pursue as a result of its investigation. In theory, the damage assessment could be discovered in court and risks giving the defense an opportunity for what is known as “graymail,” using the threat of exposing state secrets in public court. to get the DOJ to drop the case.
Haines, in his Friday notification to Congress, promised that the ODNI will “coordinate closely with the DOJ to ensure that this evaluation of the IC is conducted in a manner that does not unduly interfere with the ongoing criminal investigation of the DOJ”.
In January, the National Archives recovered 15 boxes of presidential materials containing 184 documents that contained classified markings, “including 67 documents marked CONFIDENTIAL, 92 documents marked SECRET, and 25 documents marked TOP SECRET,” according to a DOJ affidavit released in the past. Friday.
The Justice Department sought a warrant to search Mar-a-Lago earlier this month and obtained 11 sets of classified material, including one marked “top secret/SCI” and four marked “top secret” .