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In the immediate aftermath of the FBI executing a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, Republicans responded reflexively — defending Donald Trump and condemning federal law enforcement — but there was an inconvenient problem hanging overhead: The GOP, in a rather literal sense, had no idea what it was talking about.
The party didn’t know what the former president had taken to his glorified country club, the seriousness of the secret materials, what the Justice Department had presented in court to obtain a search warrant, or what steps federal law enforcement had taken before showing up at the venue’s door.
Republicans instead just lashed out, wildly and in different directions, because partisan loyalty demanded it.
But a handful of GOP officials were quietly open to the possibility that Trump had gone too far. Politico ran a report two weeks ago, highlighting some in the party who were cautious.
In an interview, Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah), an Intelligence Committee member, said it was important for the panel to glean additional information and acknowledged that mishandling of sensitive classified information would be a serious violation. “I mean, if he had actual Special Access Programs — do you know how extraordinarily sensitive that is? That’s very, very sensitive. If that were actually at his residence, that would be a problem,” Stewart said. “But we just don’t know that. So let’s find out.”
But now we do know that. As NBC News reported, after Trump’s lawyers turned over 15 boxes in January, officials at the National Archives identified items inside the boxes “marked as classified national security information, up to the level of top secret and including sensitive compartmented information and special access program materials.”
In other words, when the former president left the White House, he took with him some of the most sensitive, most highly protected secrets in the United States government.
This isn’t based on anonymous sources close to the investigation; this is based on documents Team Trump inexplicably leaked this week, thinking the revelations might help Republicans.
But look again at that quote from the Republican congressman who serves on the House Intelligence Committee: Stewart said it “would be a problem” if Trump took actual special access program materials. We now know that Trump took actual special access program materials.
So is there now a bipartisan consensus that the former president’s scandal has merit?
Politico’s report from two weeks ago also quoted Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, saying, “When you get to compartmentalized classified spaces, it gets more serious.”
But again, there’s no longer any doubt that Trump also had compartmented classified information. The leaked letter from the National Archives confirmed this, as did the FBI inventory from the Mar-a-Lago search.
All of which makes the quotes from Stewart and McCaul that much more significant: If we’re evaluating the controversy by the standards espoused by conservative congressional Republicans, what Trump is alleged to have done is both “serious” and “a problem.”