White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday that President Joe Biden has not been briefed on what national security problems the materials seized from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence possibly pose.
A reporter asked Jean-Pierre whether Biden should “want to know the details” of what was included in Trump’s seized documents, if they pertain to “national security questions.”
“When it comes to national security questions, and even classified materials, this is just something that we don’t speak to,” Jean-Pierre said Monday during a press briefing.
“This is just something that we are not informed on. This is something that is the independence of the Department of Justice. As it relates to [the Office of the Director of National Intelligence], we are not involved, we are not briefed, we are not aware.”
“When it comes to the ODNI, the letter, I can surely tell you that the president was not briefed on that,” she added.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told lawmakers in a letter that her office will lead an "assessment of the potential risk to national security that would result from the disclosure of the relevant documents,” Politico reported.
"The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) are working together to facilitate a classification review of relevant materials, including those recovered during the search," Haines wrote in the Friday letter, according to the outlet.
Haines’s letter came the same day the redacted version of the affidavit used to justify the raid on Mar-a-Lago was unsealed.
The affidavit showed that the FBI reviewed an initial 15 boxes from the residence retrieved by the National Archives and Records Administration in January. The boxes included "newspapers, magazines, printed news articles, photos, miscellaneous print-outs, notes, presidential correspondence, personal and post-presidential records and 'a lot of classified records,'" according to the affidavit.
After reviewing the initial boxes, the FBI believed there to be probable cause of "evidence of obstruction" and “additional documents that contain classified [National Defense Information]” at the residence, the affidavit said.
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