Former President Donald Trump was slammed Wednesday after a new report claimed he had super top secret documents describing a foreign country’s nuclear capacities stashed at his Florida resort home.
Former Defense Secretary William Cohen, a lifelong Republican, led a chorus of outrage, calling the new report fresh evidence that Trump poses a “clear and present threat to democracy.”
Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti called the mere presence of the document at Trump’s home evidence of a grave crime.
“It is among our nation’s most closely held secrets,” Mariotti said on Twitter. “What possible justification is there for taking and holding this document in a country club?”
FBI seized the nuclear documents along with hundreds of classified documents during the Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago, The Washington Post reported late Tuesday.
The paper cited unidentified “people familiar with the search.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., dodged questions about the search and whether he wanted to be briefed on the potential national intelligence issues, claiming he had not been in touch with fellow lawmakers during the end-of-summer recess.
“We’re following like all of you are,” McConnell told reporters.
Trump previously denied reports that there were nuclear secrets found at Mar-a-Lago, calling them a “hoax.”
But the ex-president uncharacteristically avoided mentioning the new nuclear report in a rant about the search on his social media platform.
Instead he complained that they took some of his medical and tax records, which the FBI says were mixed in with highly classified information in boxes in a lightly secured storage room.
“They also improperly took my complete and highly confidential medical file and history, with all the bells and whistles (at least they’ll see that I’m very healthy, an absolutely perfect physical specimen!),” Trump wrote.
Trump’s own former attorney general trashed that complaint, noting that the fact Trump kept personal documents alongside highly classified documents is evidence of mishandling.
“If you find very sensitive documents in Trump’s desk along with his passports, that ties Trump to those documents,” Barr said Wednesday on Fox News.
A day earlier, Barr slammed the federal judge who appointed a special master to comb through the documents.
The conservative former Trump loyalist also came close to predicting Trump will face indictment, praising the government for having “very strong evidence.”
Even Fox News morning host Steve Doocy noted that there is no good reason for Trump to have taken the documents, much less defied a subpoena to give them back.
“That doesn’t seem like something you should have in your post-presidential drawer,” Doocy said.
But Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., countered by slamming the Justice Department for possibly leaking the information.
“All this information is coming from one side and one place,” he said. “Who are the sources with knowledge of the investigation? The FBI and Justice Department.”
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