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It's the information itself. we have to have a track record or paper that says that was done. we don't have that yet. >> yeah. and it's going to depend on the statute. like i said, the espionage statute, the one i'm talking about there, there's one, gross negligence intent level there where somebody who's just so reckless and negligent in their handling of the documents can be charged with the crime. one of the others is willful. and we could do a whole semester of law school on the difference between grossly negligent and willful. >> let's not on a friday night. >> let's not in the four minut...

Secure facilities in mar-a-largo. so there's no way that president trump violated the espionage act by declassifying these records and taking them with him. he was the president of the united states when he declassified them and they're safe in morgue, this is a political hit job by attorney general merrick garland and the biden justice department. >> sean: i'll come back to that in a second. chris, going to you. how serious are the statutes that were cited in this warrant? >> sean, these are heavyweight statutes. the first, 793 is basically the espionage statute. it talks about things that he...

Statutes that the agents gave to the judge before they -- when they sought to get permission to do this search on monday. and obviously one of the ones that jumps out at us is the espionage statute. which the way that one works is, you know, it sort of bypasses the immediate defense that you're already hearing from donald trump and his allies, his legal team, which is, well, he declassified everything. and what this statute talks about is essentially the misuse of what is national defense information. and so that's one of the interesting things here because there's other statutes that they cou...

That jumps out at us is the espionage statute. which the way that one works is, you know, it sort of bypasses the immediate defense that you're already hearing from donald trump and his allies, his legal team, which is, well, he declassified everything. and what this statute talks about is essentially the misuse of what is national defense information. and so that's one of the interesting things here because there's other statutes that they could have used that, you know -- to say that they're investigating. but this is the one they went for, which seems to be part of the lawyering that went i...

As you know? >> reporter: that is a very, very, very smart thing to point out. and i think it's going to be a hugely important part of this investigation because the former president is coming up with various excuses or explanations for why these things were there. one of them is, you know, i declassified them. another one is even more exotic one is that just by sending documents to the residence at the white house from the secure areas of white house to his bedroom, that by virtue of that he was declassifying them. all of these things obviously there's a reason why he's doing this because he ...