Former DNI Raises Concerns Over Potential ‘Misclassified Documents’ Seized in Mar-a-Lago Raid

Former White House Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said Sunday that the FBI took documents from Donald Trump’s Florida Mar-a-Lago home that had questionable classification levels.

“The FBI took 11,000 documents from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, and they claim that there are reports of hundreds of documents that have classified markings,” Ratcliffe said in an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.”

Ratcliffe noted that he is unsure if any of the documents include “Russia-gate or Steele reporting documents” but that if they do, “there’s a question of whether or not they’re marked top secret, whether they are top secret.”

Former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s infamous “Steele dossier” was used to obtain a spy warrant on members of the Trump 2016 presidential campaign. The widely discredited dossier was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

“I saw hundreds, if not thousands, of documents related to Christopher Steele, and the Steele reporting … things like the Alpha Bank connections that were in the Steele dossier, all of these things were make-believe but were marked ‘top secret,’” said Ratcliffe. “All of these things were no more top secret than your children’s creative writing assignments for their homework.”

“So there’s an issue of classification of those documents, they’re going to have to look at documents marked ‘top secret’ to determine whether or not there really was any national security information in there of any value,” Ratcliffe said. “I can tell you from personal experience that many of those Russia-gate documents were not top secret, although they were marked that way.”

Ratcliffe’s comments come after U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon appointed senior Judge Raymond Dearie as a “special master” to review documents the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago in August.

Dearie, 79, was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 to the federal bench in Brooklyn, New York. He retired in 2011 and now serves as a semi-retired senior judge. He

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