Whatever happened to the Trump classified documents ‘damage assessment?’
Byron York
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE TRUMP CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS ‘DAMAGE ASSESSMENT?’ It was big news at the time. Shortly after the Aug. 8, 2022, FBI raid to seize classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, the winter home of former President Donald Trump, Democrats in Congress asked the intelligence community to do a “damage assessment.” In a letter to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) cited news reports about the classification levels of the documents, including one sensational Washington Post story that Trump held documents concerning nuclear weapons. “At least one report indicates that the FBI’s investigation focused in part on highly classified documents ‘relating to nuclear weapons,’ which are among our nation’s most closely guarded secrets,” they wrote. “If this report is true, it is hard to overstate the national security danger that could emanate from the reckless decision to remove and retain this material.”
In response, Haines wrote that she would begin an “assessment of the potential risk to national security that would result from the disclosure of the relevant documents.”
The letters set off a wave of news coverage. The whole idea of a “damage assessment,” of course, presumed that there was, in fact, damage done by Trump’s handling of classified material. That was not known by the public at the time and is still not known today. But such nuance was mostly lost in the sometimes-hysterical discussion of the Schiff-Maloney letter.
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“I can’t even imagine how much damage this could have done,” said Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI official who appears regularly on MSNBC. “Everyone understandably is focused on crime, crime, crime. I’m focused on damage. … Who did he show it to? … [The FBI] had probable cause to believe that espionage may be occurring.” There was a lot of talk like that. The upshot was that it was critically important for Congress and the people to know the harm to national security done by Trump’s mishandling of classified information.
But here’s the thing: The intelligence community has never delivered its “damage assessment” of the Trump Mar-a-Lago documents affair. Lawmakers who today would like to know if any damage was done by President Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents are remembering that they never heard anything about possible damage in the Trump matter.
“We have not been briefed” on the Trump matter, said one member of the House Intelligence Committee in a recent text exchange. “We didn’t get an answer,” said another member. “The committee has not received a briefing on Mar-a-Lago yet,” said another person familiar with the issue. On the Senate side, a member of the Intelligence Committee said, “I don’t think we ever got an assessment.”
Last week, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee also said his panel had never been informed about any intelligence community “damage assessment” of the Trump matter. “I’ve called that we ought to be briefed, in terms of an intelligence assessment, on what were in these documents that then-Vice President Biden had,” Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) said on Fox News’s Special Report. “I still am waiting on the briefing on the Mar-a-Lago documents.”
Warner went on to explain that “there have been some scheduling issues, then there have been concerns when the special counsel got involved.” The bottom line was, there’s been no word on whatever “damage assessment,” if any, the intelligence community performed.
Why not? Some sources believe the intelligence community did conduct an assessment but did not find any serious damage done by Trump’s actions. “If there had been something significant it would have been briefed and leaked by now,” said one source. Warner appears to at least suspect that the intelligence community is giving Congress the runaround. And another source suggested the intelligence community holds its congressional overseers in such low regard that it simply feels lawmakers have no need to know the facts of the case. “The IC feels like it does not have to tell Congress anything,” the source said.
We have come a long way from those days of frenzied speculation in August 2022 when the news was that the nation’s intelligence mavens would conduct a “damage assessment” of the Mar-a-Lago situation. Now, with the benefit of months of experience and hindsight, we know…nothing.
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