is the sort of thing that makes it more likely that ultimately we ll see a criminal charge here whether it is an actual classified documents charge or the statute that they listed in the search warrant about national defense information. mar-a-lago, manhattan, trump t towers, bed minister, they are all targets. every nation out there is after information. and so this is extraordinarily concerning. and it points to the absurdity of the whole idea of the special master. setting aside all the legal problematic issues there, but you cannot separate people say well, she let the damage assessment go forward. that is true, but do you know what the damage assessment can t do? it can t take this document, send it down to the lab at the fbi and dust for fingerprints to figure out who has touched it. that is important for the damage assessment. it is also really important for the counterintelligence investigations to figure out who might have had access and of course it is also potentially re
three classified documents in desks inside mr. trump s office with more than 100 documents in 13 boxes or containers. that was twice the number the classified documents the president s lawyers returned voluntarily while swearing an oath that they returned all the material demanded by the government. how significant is this? alex, the best way i can convey this to you, when i saw the photo of the volume of classified information with all of those, you know, cover folders, it gave me heart palpitations. as referenced, when i was in the fbi working counterintelligence investigations which were top secret, if we stepped away from our desk for a 30-minute lunch break, we would lock those up. that was in a secure fbi office. of course, if i were to remove any kind of restricted information from a scif, for
this i guess this phrase no foreign, this designation, no foreign. again that means no release to foreign nationals. it s eye catching because several foreign nationals have been arrested at mar-a-lago in years from time to time and a new report from the pittsburgh post gazette says an investigation is under way of a ukrainian immigrant who used a fake id to rub elbows with president trump last year there while these documents were there. so i guess you would be committing malpractice if you did not have a concern about this. i spent many years conducting and overseeing counterintelligence investigations. i can tell you that mar-a-lago is a spy s dream. it s a soft target. it s open to the public. there s all sorts of ways in for a trained, determined intelligence officer. there are all kinds of ways in
between this and watergate? okay. where operatives broke into the democratic national committee? here in reverse, democrats no broke into the home of the 45th president of the united states. no, actually, no, donald trump. joining us now, state attorney for palm beach county, florida, dave aronberg. and lecturer at yale university s jackson institute for foreign affairs, a former fbi agent specializing in counterintelligence investigations. mike barnicle has the first question. mike? dave, a federal search warrant was issued and acted upon yesterday at mar-a-lago, an area you are familiar with. tell us about the federal search warrants. do they not have to list up front exactly what they re looking for, and at the conclusion of the search warrant, why they want those items, in order for a judge to
agent in the fbi counterintelligence investigations, as well as an editor at the justice security lock. thank you very much for coming on the. show the director of the fbi called politically motivated violence a, quote, threatened 65-day phenomenon. how does that compare to your time in the fbi and how concerned are you, and should we be? thank you for having me on. i m very concerned. and this is a shift, right. in my time, at the fbi, the terrorism threat was international terrorism. it was al-qaeda, isis, and that is where the fbi s resources were focused. last year, the national security council released a domestic a strategy to counter domestic terrorism, and it identified the growing threat of domestic terrorism as specifically to different types of domestic terrorism. one is racially motivated extremist violence, and the other is militia extremist