A federal judge in Florida unsealed a less-redacted version of the affidavit that federal investigators used to secure a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago, revealing previously unknown details about the classified materials former President Donald Trump illegally took to his Mar-a-Lago residence.
As reported by multiple news outlets, Trump’s lawyers provided to investigators 38 unique documents with classification markings in June, under subpoena. But the newly lifted redactions in the search warrant affidavit indicate that some of those classified files contained markings for “HCS, SI and FISA,” according to court filings made public on Tuesday, CNN reports.
“These classification markings indicate that the documents were connected to extremely sensitive government programs. ‘HCS’ refers to human sources, or spies, that often work with the CIA. ‘SI’ refers to signals intercepts that are typically handled by the National Security Agency. And ‘FISA’ refers to domestic surveillance and wiretaps related to counterintelligence.” the report states.
These new revelations confirm for the first time that documents related to these sensitive programs were returned to the US government as part of the June subpoena. Previous court filings indicated that when Trump voluntarily returned 15 boxes of materials to the National Archives in January, they contained 184 classified documents, including some with the same HCS, SI and FISA labels, as well as other classification markings.
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The new details about the investigation come a Trump and DOJ are in a legal battle over the “special master” requested by Trump to review the documents seized by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago.
Earlier this month, MSNBC host Joy Reid caused a stir when she wondered during her show whether former President Donald Trump’s possession of classified documents could be linked to a “rash” of deaths among America’s spies in recent months.
During a panel discussion on “The Reid Out,” Reid attempted to connect the dots between the material found at Trump’s Florida home and reports of a string of US spies being killed, captured or compromised.
“You know, while all of this is happening, we know that in 2021, there was a rash of deaths of American spies,” Reid told viewers. “They were being caught. They were being killed. Because this is a very real and exigent circumstance. And the CIA has admitted to that now.”
“We are not saying that we know that there is some connection between the purloined documents and those events,” she added, “but they did happen at a time when Trump did have custody of some really sensitive information that he shouldn’t have had.”
What if she was right?
