‘Something horribly failed.’ How did so many of America’s secrets end up at Mar-a-Lago?
WASHINGTON — At least 300 documents containing classified information left the White House with former President Donald Trump, an unprecedented situation that has led to the FBI investigating possible violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice.
The documents, recovered by the National Archives and FBI over the course of two years from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate along with more than 11,000 other nonclassified government records, include some of the government’s most highly protected secrets, such as information from spies and informants.
Now, details of the documents’ removal and haphazard storage revealed in the days following the Aug. 8 court-approved search of Trump’s home have left the intelligence community reeling and the public asking: “How could it happen?”
“Something horribly failed... at Trump’s White House for him to have walked away with all these documents without somebody raising an alarm before he left,” said Larry Pfeiffer, a former high-ranking CIA officer in the George W. Bush administration and former senior director of the White House Situation Room in the Obama administration.
The process of getting records back for preservation when a president leaves office has been honed over decades. The power rests in the hands of the White House staff secretary, who is tasked with making sure the president has the
