Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the Intelligence Committee chairman who helped prosecute the first of two impeachment cases against Donald Trump, is seriously concerned about the intelligence and national security implications of the documents in the former president's possession.
Speaking to MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Monday, Schiff explained that the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago makes him question what Trump was doing and thinking.
"What was the purpose behind this?" Schiff also asked. "And then finally, evidence that he reviewed them himself is going to make it much more difficult to foist responsibility onto others, which, as you point out, is a favorite pastime of the former president."
Schiff said that one of the assumptions he made was that Trump took the documents that were related to the Russia probe. But it turns out the documents were all over the place and about various different issues, not exclusively about the Russia probe, as his adviser Kash Patel told right-wing streaming shows.
A recent report from The New York Times cited sources close to Trump saying that he personally went through the documents before the National Archives picked up the 15 boxes that they took back in Jan. 2022. So, it means that Trump has no chance of blaming his lawyers or other staff for his behavior.
"What has struck me about this story from the beginning — and of course, we had no heads-up about the search or anything like it — but, is the degree to which evidence seems to be coming forward of willfulness," Schiff also noted. "I'm particularly struck, for example, by the reporting that one of the Trump lawyers signed an affidavit saying that they had turned over all the classified documents when plainly from the search inventory, that wasn't true."
It will raise questions about whether the lawyer, Christina Bobb, knowingly lied to the court, or Trump lied to her.
"From the Intel Committee perspective, though, we're just really frightened of what's in that stockpile, particularly those that are marked top secret, SCI information because those generally mean that there's a very sensitive source involved, like a human source whose life could be put at risk, or a technical source that if it's discovered means we're going to have a blind spot where we used to be able to see. So, we're deeply concerned about all of this."
Schiff has already requested from the intelligence committee a damage assessment about what Trump's possession of the documents could mean for American national security.
"It's something they traditionally do to determine if this material is compromised," he explained. "If it did get in the wrong hands, what is the damage, and how do we mitigate it? How do we protect a source if that source's life may be at risk, or how do we protect the technical source? So that, I think, we should be briefed on."
He also said that at some point he wants to see what the documents were personally. That can complicate a criminal investigation, and he said he doesn't want to impede a criminal probe at all. But at some point, he wants to see the specifics and get a full briefing from the intelligence community.
See the full interview below: