Earlier this year, federal law enforcement officials asked former President Donald Trump to better secure the storage room at his Mar-a-Lago resort where he was keeping presidential records -- and his staff complied by putting a padlock on the storage room door.
However, the Wall Street Journal reports that when FBI agents searched the resort earlier this month, they found national security documents outside of the designated area that Trump said he had secured.
Specifically, writes the Journal, agents "found highly sensitive and classified documents lying in unsecure places outside the storage room."
Additionally, the Journal reports that federal law enforcement officials were tipped off by "at least one person familiar with the location of the documents at the complex," and that this tip alarmed them to the point where they felt they needed to execute a search warrant at the former president's residence.
In a letter sent by the National Archives to Trump earlier this year that was revealed on Monday evening, the agency said it had found " items marked as classified national security information, up to the level of Top Secret and including Sensitive Compartmented Information and Special Access Program materials" in documents that Trump had already handed over.
Special Access Program materials, notes the Journal, are some of the most sensitive secrets the government has, and are "generally accessible only in specially designed Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, or SCIFs."
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