Written by Hudson Crozier

We now know the charges Trump is being investigated for. But we still don’t know what provoked the raid on Mar-a-Lago.

The alleged crimes: Based on the FBI’s search warrant for Donald Trump’s Florida estate, the former president is being investigated for possibly violating three federal laws that all have to do with the mishandling of classified documents.

• The Espionage Act prohibits disclosing “national defense” documents to any unauthorized individual.
• The other two statutes are “obstruction of justice” laws prohibiting the removal and destruction of classified documents.

What’s their evidence? We don’t know. That information would be in the FBI affidavit, which the Department of Justice has been reluctant to release, even as Republican congressmen demand it. The only possible motive known to the public is that the FBI may have been looking for documents related to “nuclear weapons,” according to TheWashington Post’s anonymous sources.

Trump claims that he had declassified every document seized by the FBI, that the Bureau “didn’t need to ‘seize’ anything,” and that he would have cooperated with any investigation without it escalating to this point. His claim that the documents were declassified has merit, seeing as he had the ultimate authority to declassify anything as president.