Top House Democrats ask for review to determine 'national security damage' done by Trump

On Saturday, Democratic House Reps. Adam Schiff and Carolyn Maloney, as heads of the House Intelligence and Oversight committees, sent a letter to the Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, asking her to “review potential damage to national security stemming from former President Donald Trump’s storage of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.”

Citing recent reports, the letter calls it an “urgent matter,” and notes that the documents seized included “11 sets of classified documents ranging from ‘Confidential’ to ‘Secret’ to ‘Top Secret’ and ‘TS/CSI’ documents,” that would cause “exceptionally grave damage to the national security.” The letter asks for an immediate damage assessment, and a classified briefing on the results of the assessment as quickly as possible.

In the meantime, Donald Trump and his allies have—when they’re not busy fundraising off of his potential crimes—pivoted from claiming that the FBI planted the incriminating documents, to now saying that the documents were all declassified anyway because of Trump’s "standing order,” and that there’s nothing to see here. Except—even if one accepts the whole “standing order” nonsense—the Espionage Act and the other two laws named in the search warrant don’t reference materials as classified or unclassified in defining the crimes. 

Stay tuned.