On Monday's edition of CNN's "The Situation Room," former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper outlined the severity of the problem former President Donald Trump has created for the intelligence agencies by stashing boxes of highly classified information at his Mar-a-Lago country club in Palm Beach, Florida.
One of the biggest issues, Clapper noted, is that the intelligence community has little way of knowing who has seen the documents, and what has been compromised.
"How challenging is it for the intelligence community to conduct a damage assessment of all these documents, which were clearly improperly stored and shuffled around a beach resort for more than a year?" asked anchor Pamela Brown
"Well, it's going to be a challenge. There's no question about it," said Clapper. "One of the things that concerns me is the chain of custody from the time the documents were in the White House and who had access to them, who packed them, how were they protected when they were transported, who had access to them at Mar-a-Lago, which that in itself, I think, is going to be a difficult challenge to sort out."
One of their only options, Clapper argued, is to assume everything was compromised.
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"The intelligence community, I think, will have to approach this with a worst-case assumption, meaning that the documents, assume the documents were exposed to a sophisticated adversary, a foreign intelligence service," said Clapper. "What is it they could glean from an examination and study, scrutiny of these documents? And doing it, of course, in such a way, particularly when the results of the assessment are promulgated that it not jeopardize the conduct of the investigation. So this is a tricky proposition, no question about it."
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James Clapper on "chain of custody" issues with Mar-a-Lago documentswww.youtube.com
