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At the end of Trump’s term in office, secret documents are lost. Since then there has been no trace of them.
Washington – Was the election of Donald Trump as President of the USA in 2016 influenced by Russia? The US secret service, together with its NATO allies, has collected evidence that apparently suggests this. But the secret documents have disappeared since Trump left office, according to the news channel CNN now reported.
Several actions involving Russia documents at the last second
It should be an entire collection of data bundled into a folder. This is said to contain, among other things, information about Russian secret agents. In the final days of Trump’s presidency, the folder was released, according to sources CNN still seen in the White House. On his last day as president, the Republican politician even ordered the documents to be released to the public. Despite the urgent warnings from security circles, he did not let himself be dissuaded from his idea.
Republican employees then combed through the documents and blacked them out. The documents, which were classified as secret, were then to be passed on widely in Washington to party members and journalists. Mark Meadows, Trump’s White House chief of staff at the time, was in charge of the work.
The trail of documents is lost in the White House
But the project quickly stalled. White House lawyers called for further redactions. The copies that had already been sent had to be retrieved quickly.
On January 20, 2021, events apparently came to a head. Meadows rushed to the Justice Department a few minutes before Joe Biden’s inauguration. He wanted to submit a version of the documents with more extensive redactions for release. Individual blacked out documents were subsequently taken to the National Archives. But since then there has been no trace of the originals.
Donald Trump appears in the courtroom for his civil trial on fraud charges before the New York State Supreme Court on October 24, 2023 in New York. © Maansi Srivastava/afp
The folder is believed to be in an unspecified location. One thing is clear: When the FBI searched Trump’s vacation residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, in August of last year, the secret service documents were not on the list of objects that the officials were supposed to find there.
Employee blames Trump’s chief of staff Meadows
Cassidy Hutchinson blames Meadows, her former boss, for the folder’s disappearance. She incriminated him at a congressional hearing: “I’m almost certain that Mr. Meadows went home,” Hutchinson said, according to the Minutes of the hearing. “The folder was never returned and it never left our office to be taken anywhere internally. He stayed in our office safe most of the time.”
She further explains: “But he wasn’t in the safe on the last day either. I checked again to make sure we didn’t have anything in there.” Meadows took the documents with him. The accused’s lawyers deny the allegations. Likewise, his page does not contribute to the question of the whereabouts of the folder.
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CNN asked around at various points about the current status of the investigations. The official authorities and public institutions CIA, FBI, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Director of National Intelligence and the National Archives did not comment on the research. Hutchinson’s attorney also did not accept the offer to comment. The Trump site did not respond to the request. The former US president was even indicted this year for taking secret military information with him from office.
Already in 2017, US secret services made public that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered an influence campaign to harm Hilary Clinton. She was Trump’s opponent at the time. Apparently covert cyber activities were carried out to help Trump win the election.
2023-12-16 21:18:42
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