“I cannot think of a historical precedent in which there was even the suspicion that a president or even a high-ranking officer in the administration, with the exception of the Nixon administration, purposely and consciously or even accidentally removing such a sizable volume of papers,“ said Richard Immerman, who served as assistant deputy director of national intelligence from 2007 to 2009.
FBI agents who searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort on Aug. 8 found more than 100 documents with classification markings, including 18 marked top secret, 54 secret and 31 confidential, according to court filings. The FBI also identified 184 documents marked as classified in 15 boxes recovered by the National Archives in January, and it received additional classified documents during a June visit to Mar-a-Lago. An additional 10,000 other government records with no classification markings were also found.
Documents have been recovered from Trump’s bedroom, closet, bathroom and storage areas at his Florida resort, which doubles as his home. In June, when Justice Department officials met a Trump lawyer to retrieve records in response to a subpoena, the lawyer handed them documents in a "Redweld envelope, double-wrapped in tape.”
Trump has claimed he declassified all the documents in his possession and had been working in earnest with department officials on returning documents when they conducted the Mar-a-Lago search. During the 2016 campaign, Trump asserted that Clinton’s use of her private email server for sensitive State Department material was disqualifying for her candidacy; chants from his supporters to “lock her up” became a mainstay at his political rallies.
But Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, said in a separate Fox News interview that he was “skeptical” of Trump’s claim that he declassified everything. “People say this (raid) was unprecedented – well, it’s also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put them in a country club, OK,” Barr said.
Obama, while writing his White House memoir after leaving office, had paper records he used in his research delivered to him in locked bags from a secure National Archives storage facility and returned them in similar fashion.
Neil Eggleston, who served as White House counsel during the final years of the Obama administration, recalled that Fred Fielding, who held the same position in the George W. Bush administration, advised him as he started his new job to hammer home to staff the requirements set in the records act.
Similarly, Trump’s White House counsel, Donald McGahn, sent a staff-wide memo in the first weeks of the administration underscoring “that presidential records are the property of the United States.”
“There’s no intelligence community directive that says how presidents should or shouldn’t be briefed on the materials,” said Pfeiffer, now director of the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security. “We’ve never had to worry about it before.”
People around the president with access to intelligence are trained on intelligence rules on handling classified information and required to follow them. But imposing restrictions on the president would be difficult for intelligence agencies, Pfeiffer said, because “by virtue of being the executive of the executive branch, he sets all the rules with regard to secrecy and classification.”