Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said on Saturday that former President Donald Trump took highly classified documents to Mar-a-Lago to either use as leverage or to sell it.
Kaine told CNN’s Jim Acosta, “My gut tells me the reason that Donald Trump took all this classified information—I’m on the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committee. I spend a lot of time in secure Senate facilities —I know what this information is like. The reason Trump took this with him to Florida was probably to try to either sell it or have it as a get out of jail free card.”
He added: “Under Biden, these secrets are safe. But the DOJ effort, the FBI effort, to bring back these secrets so that Donald Trump doesn’t have them and have some consequences for him for taking them with him in an unauthorized way.”
Kaine’s comment comes a month after the FBI recovered several boxes of classified information while executing a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. They include documents that bore classification markings ranging from Confidential to Top Secret/SCI.
The Department of Justice is investigating whether the former president violated the Espionage Act and obstructed justice in his mishandling of government records.
“It’s really important that we impose accountability for this,” Kaine said. “We’re not in an easy time right now. Accountability for Donald Trump will make some people mad. But refusing to impose accountability will be much more destructive to US democracy than insisting that nobody’s above the law.”
