PHOENIX — 14 of the 15 boxes recovered from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida contained classified documents.
According to the FBI affidavit released Friday, many of them were top secret mixed with newspapers, magazines and personal correspondence.
67 documents were marked as confidential, 92 were marked as secret, and 25 documents were marked as top secret.
Valley lawyer Benjamin Taylor met with ABC15 to provide some context to the latest document dump. Taylor specializes in personal injury and criminal defense.
"The reason why a lot of the items are redacted is to protect any sort of witnesses who potentially can testify in the future,” Taylor says. “Protect them from harm. Sometimes people get mad and attack witnesses, and you want to protect them from being harmed by redacting information.”
The affidavit says there is also probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction will be found at [Mar-a-Lago]. Taylor says the government classifies information in order to protect national security.
"The government, they classified different documents for different levels. Top secret is one of the highest levels that the government classifies documents. So, when it is top secret that means nobody should be able to see it. No members of public, no members of the media, nobody should be able to see it,” Taylor says.
What is unredacted, shows the timeline of the Justice Department’s investigation leading up to the Mar-a-Lago search.
If this case were to go to trial, Taylor says that’s when the public would be able to hear and listen to any testimony of witnesses and government officials of what was believed to be in former President Trump’s search of his Mar-a-Lago home.
