Former Trump’s national security adviser said that recent Mar-a-Lago’s discovery is very serious classification issue

According to John Bolton, who served as former President Trump’s national security adviser, the fact that documents marked as classified were found in the same boxes as non-classified items, such as newspaper clippings, demonstrates that the former president had “disdain” for the seriousness of classification issues.

This remark was made by Bolton during an interview that took place on Friday with the senior investigative correspondent for CBS News, Catherine Herridge. New court documents were made public on Friday morning, revealing the inventory of records that the FBI took during their search at Mar-a-Lago one month ago. In the inventory were photographs, articles of apparel, newspaper clippings, and images of people wearing the items, as well as empty classified files. The inventory detailed a large number of classified documents.

Herridge questioned Bolton about the effects that the mixing of these data might have on the country’s national security.

“Well, it shows a real disdain for the seriousness of the classification at issue,” Bolton said to Herridge. “To the extent that the newspaper clippings were treated like most people in this country would treat newspaper clippings, it shows a real disdain for the seriousness of the classification at issue.” “In the majority of workplaces, the sensitive classified information is kept locked up in safes and the unclassified information is handled with extreme caution. This is a very clear distinction between the two types of information. In my opinion, this is another proof that Donald Trump did not pay much attention to the sensitivity of the sensitive information.”

In an interview with CBS News conducted in August, Bolton stated that the manner in which the previous president handled sensitive information “worried” him. According to Bolton, who has been a lifetime conservative but has become an outspoken critic of Trump, Trump’s routine intelligence briefings sometimes included discussions of nuclear weapons information. According to Bolton, many times those providing intelligence briefings would bring images or graphs for the president to look at and then present them to him.

“Quite frequently, the president would inquire, “Well, am I allowed to retain this?” And in my experience, the intelligence briefers would most frequently respond something along the lines of “Well sir, we’d prefer to take it back,” “Bolton stated. “However, there were occasions when they forgot.”

Bolton was worried about the fact that Trump intended to have secret materials in his possession.

According to what Bolton had to say about the matter, “my concern was that he didn’t feel that the confidentiality of much of this information was as critical as we knew it to be.” “It just didn’t register with him that securing this material for its own sake and because of the risk to sources and means of collecting the data could be put in jeopardy,” says the author. “It just didn’t register with him.”

Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich tweeted on Friday in response to the release of a more detailed inventory list that the new list “only further proves that this unprecedented and unnecessary raid of President Trump’s home was not some surgical, confined search and retrieval that the Biden administration claims, it was a SMASH AND GRAB.”