Biden admin backs damage assessment on Trump docs, but claims Biden 'not involved'

The White House on Monday signaled its approval of an intelligence community effort to perform a "damage assessment" on former President Donald Trump's storage of classified documents at his Florida estate, but stressed that President Joe Biden was "not involved" in the task.

"It is an appropriate action for the director in the intelligence community to undertake, but, again, I'll let them speak to the details of this," National Security Council (NSC) spokesman John Kirby told reporters, according to the Washington Examiner. He previously insisted that the NSC was not prepared to perform the assessment itself.

Kirby's comments follow the public release of a heavily-redacted affidavit that accompanied the search warrant the FBI used to conduct its raid on Mar-a-Lago. The warrant application relied heavily on media reports, including a CBS Miami article about moving trucks at the estate and a Breitbart News article in which former Trump adviser Kash Patel discussed the FBI's previous removal of classified documents from the estate on behalf of the National Archives.

Earlier this year, the Bureau secured 184 boxes of classified material from Trump's home. Despite the president's extensive cooperation and voluntary surrender of the documents, the FBI nonetheless cited this incident in the affidavit as establishing "probable cause" to conduct the raid.

After the raid, Trump filed a motion for the court to appoint a "special master" to review the documents the Bureau took from his home in August and to halt the federal government from further examining them, pending litigation. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has signaled her "preliminary intent to appoint a special master" in accordance with Trump's request, potentially upending the intelligence committee's damage assessment effort.