i'm sandra smith. >> mike: i'm mike >> martha: good afternoon, everybody. our continuing coverage of the breaking news story both on capitol hill and out of the mar-a-largo situation. the deadline has now arrived. it is 3:00 p.m. for the former president to contest the court in the release of the warrant that was involved in the raid of his florida home. fox news has just reviewed the warrant along with the property receipt. we're going through all of this. you've heard some of it over the course of the last several minutes. there were 20 boxes of items that were removed. some of them were labelled "top secret." binders, photos, handwritten notes also seized. we'll go through the list. the president's former chief of

staff, mick mulvaney, bret baier, congressman jim banks and victor davis hanson are all on deck to weigh-in on what is going on right now with this investigation. a lot of questions. first, to david spunt joining us with the latest as he learns it from there. hi, david. >> hi, martha. the last hour or so, fox news has reviewed this warrant and property list. it's like a receipt based on what the fbi took from mar-a-largo. we're waiting for this warrant to drop on the court's page meaning the judge has agreed to it. judge bruce rinehart. i want to get to the meat of what was taken from mar-a-largo. we're told four sets of top secret documents, three sets of secret documents, three sets of confidential documents, an executive grant issued to roger stone and an unspecified binders and photos.

we're told a leather bound box of documents. also we're told, martha, in the 20 boxes, according to this search warrant that was reviewed, the locations to be searched include the 45 office, all storage rooms and all other areas within the premise used or available to be used by the former president and his staff in which documents could be stored. so this is what we're getting from the actual search warrant. as bret baier said in the last hour, we want so see what's in the affidavit. that's the next big ticket. that should have more substantial information there. i was at the news conference yesterday with attorney general merrick garland. that was significant in the fact that he spoke about an on going investigation. obviously circumstances here are different in this case. he felt the public interest was strong. i spoke to people at the justice department. they said that he was weighing all week whether or not to say something. i asked about this affidavit.

will we see the affidavit? will he say something? you know merrick garland and he plays by the book. there's not been a filing for the affidavit. that would have more detail. but still we're learning a lot. >> martha: indeed we are. more to uncover here. thanks, david spunt at the justice department. with that, we bring in former u.s. attorney brett toll man. good to have you here today. you had a chance to see what they took out of mar-a-largo. what is your action on this? >> there's three choices for merrick garland. they wanted the information sooner than they were allowed by trump and his lawyers or they had some political agenda or the third option is you raid that home because you have fear of destruction of evidence or that there may be violent individual

that you need to use that sort of show of force. the thing is, we still don't know to this day, we don't know why a former president of the united states is subjected to a technique and a strategy that was outside the bounds of what we have seen historically by the department of justice. >> martha: that's absolutely right. we don't know. as we said many times, we don't have this affidavit, which would give us more meat on the bones in terms of why the judge approved this. when you look at this list, you've got executive grant of clemency for roger stone jr. information, the president of france. leather bound documents. why would they be taking binders of photos from the house? why would you take those? >> it all depends on the four corners of the affidavit. in essence, what they represented, they were going --

they were needing to take from the home if they observed it. now, under the plane site doctrine, if they saw evidence of something that they believed was criminal while searching, they can grab that. that doesn't seem to be what's going on here. what this appears to be is a very broad and general affidavit in support of seizing documents that they believed were inappropriately in the custody of the president. i kind of -- i back away from this and think this is the former president of the united states who has the highest clearance, has the ability to designation something as classified or to unclassify something and they also have an area in the home that they can have to review classified materials. so none of that adds up to where we are now. >> martha: none of it does. what about the fact that the judge gave them until august 19 on this warrant? and they took several days before they actually acted on the warrant. what does that tell you about the urgency, the pressing

nature? i think the bar has to be a national security concern. if that is what would drive this kind of action, i can't really think of anything short of that that would drive this action. wouldn't you need to do it right away? >> yeah, the sense of urgency i've represented, national security cases before both as a prosecutor and defense attorney. when it involves something that is highly sensitive and there's urgency behind it, it happens quickly. it did not happen now. the reason for it is as i think they were wringing their hands over the political side of this. they made a judgment call and did so because i think they needed to have the optics -- or they believed that they needed the optics that we've seen at mar-a-largo. >> martha: bret, if you can stand by. we're continuing to follow all this. we want to have you with us to continue to do that. i want to bring in another guest as we do that, cash patel,

former chief of staff at the department of defense and now a media and technology board members. thanks for being here, cash. i want to get into this issue of classifying and declassifying the information with you. first, i want your reaction to what's been revealed so far on this receipt of what was gathered at the home. >> hi, martha. great to be with you. a former national security prosecutor returned receipts, there's a distinction between criminal cases and national security cases. those are two separate divisions. the fact that these sort of things -- >> martha: i think we lost him. kash patel, we'll work on getting him back. he's making a good point here, bret. glad you're still with us. two different categories. you have criminal and national security. so what category based on what we've seen play out here do you

think this was part of? >> well, it is a good point. i have also seen both sides when the department of justice decides to treat one as a national security case and another as criminal. and what is interesting is typically when you're dealing with a national security case, it's urgent and you don't have to jump through some of the hoops that you would need to on the criminal side and you can get to the documents and then you can later make a decision on the criminal side. here we don't have a clear perspective on what they are alleging the president has done wrong, whether it is an infraction surrounding his obligations on national security or is this criminal behavior. when you use a swat team-like response, you're typically revealing that you're treating it as a criminal case. >> martha: one of the many big questions that is not filled in here is what happened between

the subpoena being issued and the original boxes being taken and what we're told is a collegial interaction and when the raid happened monday morning. we don't have a good sense yet of whether or not there was back and forth communication. is it your sense that the trump side knew that there were specific things that they wanted to come back for and were denied that opportunity? because that's not the indication that we're getting from the trump side at all. >> yeah, i will tell you that standard procedure for the department of justice and historical treatment is to do just as you outlined. it's to reach out, to engage them, especially when it's a individual that held a position in the government that required that they had a clearance, a security clearance. we have the former president of the united states. there's got to be discussions between the department of justice from the national archives or whoever believes

that there may be documents in their possession and what could have been a discussion a and an identification of what needed to be returned. instead turns in to something that you start to feel like the left is trying to capitalize as a narrative filler that helps their position. >> martha: you would think with the deep division that has happened in this country since the russia collusion situation, that they would be wanting to deal with this situation in the most careful way possible. and if that was not possible as merrick garland told us yesterday, it better be an enormous smoking gun. an issue so imperative that there was no other option, which is what he told us yesterday. but we don't have anything to back that up quite yet. stay with me for a moment, bret. if i can ask you to do that. we want to bring kash back in. when we lost you, you talked

about whether or not this is part of a criminal investigation or national security imperative that drove this raid. can you continue on that thought? >> yeah, sorry about that. a distinction between national security. this looks like it's going on according to a national security investigation, which takes it out of the criminal division and goes into the national security division. the receipts that are becoming a available show vague descriptions of things because is government will likely say some of this stuff was classified. it doesn't seem to be the case when donald trump issued sweeping declassification orders on multiple occasions as president on multiple times. so that's a distinction that we need to watch for. it's incumbent on the government, the doj, to tell us what happened. >> martha: you touched on something i want to dig in with you, which is the declassification process.

what your position was at the time and whether or not you were involved because we know there's a procedure that has to take place. the president can't just sort of wave over a bunch of boxes and say this is declassified. with you take us through the process where these documents were declassified by this president? >> yeah, the normal process -- there's multiple occasions i was serving as deputy director of national intelligence. if we needed to declassify through the normal chain of command for lower level employees, we would have to go through a rigorous process procedurally. the president of the united states hasn't always been the classification authority to classify and declassify. if he says something is declassified, that's it. it's declassified. he issued a strong statement to classify all russian gate and all hillary clinton documents. at the end of his administration, he thought so much more information needed to

be declassified, he declassified sets of documents that should have come out. the gsa has come out and said they mistakingly packed some boxes and moved them to mar-a-largo. that's not on the president. that's on the national archives to sort that material out. they cannot prosecute him for in -- even if it was classified, which i probably wasn't, they'll never meet the burden of intent because the president didn't pack it up and take it himself. the gsa said they did it and made a mistake. that should have been really the end of it. should have been a court subpoena where they said okay, we need this and we'll get the rest back to you. president obama and president clinton still have classified materials in their possessions in their homes that they haven't released to this day per the national archives. >> martha: so are you saying that these particular documents that were at mar-a-largo were all declassified in that december-january period of what

year? >> i'm saying -- the end of 2020 and early 2021 before the president left. whole sets of documents were -- john what was shipped down there. i wasn't the gsa people moving the documents. only they do. they packed them. they admitted that they packeded them and transported them and stored them somewhere. the gsa can provide more clarity on to us on how and what was moved and the gsa could have worked with the department of justice. that would have been my move as a national security operator. this is an extreme national security measure taken for what seems to be a wholly unnecessary national security approach. >> martha: all right. you're saying the gsa packed the boxes. they already admitted that they sent some of them there in error. so when in june when they went in with a subpoena and they collected the boxes, apparently then, according to one line of this story, somebody said no,

there's more here and you need to come back for what is here because it shouldn't be here. do you think that is what happened? the secret service individual was involved in that as one of the story lines that we're pursuing. >> yeah, i don't know who that individual is. i think it was clear from president trump's statement that i believe he put out on truth social that he invited whoever was there in june or whatever date to look and have whatever they want and impair phrasing to see whatever they needed. if that was the case, which seems to be because the doj has not controverted that statement, they could have come back because of a voluntary cooperation. i don't have any details in terms of that incident. again, it seems to be -- there's a different way to treat people regarding classified information if your name is hillary clinton and james comey versus donald trump. it's just not the even-handed way to do it. it's not how we used to do it at

the department of justice. >> do you know if there's interaction with the former president trump and these investigators after that june 3 when he came in and said hey, let me know if you need anything. we're here to cooperate. were there subsequent attempts, excuse me, mr. president, we need these boxes? were there efforts to have them retrieved in a much more less intrusive manner? >> i don't know. i can't speak to that. i wasn't a witness to any of that or part of those conversations. you know who could have cleared it up fast? the department of justice saying we tried on this date, this date because they have the documentation and the gsa would have been there with them because records. they can put them out overnight if they wanted to. put out the underlying information if they wanted. they're choosing not to. for the attorney general to come

in heavy-handed last night and say i personally signed off on the warrants, that's not the role of the attorney general to tell the american public. we know that. the role of the attorney general is to tell us why. where it's so necessary. that's the point of this whole conversation about nuclear information. let's say that's the case. they waited two years to go seize this information? and if they get away with a two-year mark. how about the warrant was issued friday and they took the weekend off? i would get these warrants and executed them the next minute. you'll find every national security prosecutor will tell you the same. >> martha: okay. will president trump put any other information out there? they would have records of conversations that we were approached on in july, august if we were approached in the middle of this period. do you know if he has any communications that were out

there? asking him for these things back? >> i think he's put out a lot. he's one of the most transparent presidents. he can put it out on truth social, which is his platform now. i'll tell the world the look there as much as he's willing to put out. he's put out far more than doj and the fbi has. again, it's incumbent on the department and me as a former prosecutor and i i believe in this that we need to show our positions in cases of public important. >> martha: very important exactly what was declassified by the president in the period you're talk about. we hope you'll come back and fill in this for us as we go forward, kash. thanks for calling in today. >> thank you. >> martha: with that we bring in former u.s. attorney brett tollman, executive director of right on crime. what i'd like to do is play something. i looked at james comey's statement about the classified information, top secret some of it and fbi designated some of it

as well that was found on hillary clinton's private servers that i said seems analogous to your home, right? it's on your server, it's a document that is privately owned by you, similar to having a box with a piece of paper in it in your private home. that is a fairly analogous situation. i want to take everybody back, this is july 5, 2016, this is what the then fbi director said about that situation. watch. >> eight of those chains contain information that was top secret. there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive highly classified information. she also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the united states including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries. we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. >> okay. so those are three separate parts of the statement. you'd can see where we put them

together. they're done in order of what he said. that last statement we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges was toward the end of a 15-minute statement. i want to point that out. comparable situations, brett? >> they're very capable. they're the handling and mishandling of classified materials. it reminds me of when attorney general barr was asked in 2020 whether or not he would but suit obama or biden or hillary clinton based on russia collusion issues that came up and other issues. he said i'm not going to make the department of justice political. he made the right call. comey may have been making the right call in terms of not pursuing a criminal case against hillary. but that has all changed. merrick garland has changed this. we knew he made the decision before he announced it. but it's very disappointing that we don't have the details and we

certainly don't have anything to back up the strategy and the techniques that they used in this particular case. >> martha: what about -- in that statement earlier, james comey, the former fbi director talked about it being -- if you're unknowingly handling these documents, the misdemeanor, depending how you handle these classified documents, he talked about intention with regard to that. given what kash patel just said, the gsa packed up the boxes and the president had no part of them being in his house, this is what he's reporting to right now, where would this fall on the meter of culpability given the way that we saw this raid conducted? >> well, if it turns out that gsa packaged these or if these were boxes put together and chipped from the white house when transitions from one president to the other, you don't have the mental state evidence to prove there was

intent. you have to show the president himself had the intense to take and keep and refuse to give back classified materials. that doesn't even include whether or not he designated that or declassified it. it's whether or not he had the intention and overt acts by president that back up the theory that he had the intention to commit a crime. we don't have any of that. we have merrick garland telling us there was no other alternative but to do this the way that it went and yet all the facts that we are aware of belie that assertion. >> martha: thanks, brett. i want to move to to this newer piece of information. the doj session that the former president, donald trump's lawyers will not object to the release of the mar-a-largo search warrant, which is the physical part of this document that hasn't been released on the doj website. we hope and expect we may see that soon.

with that, we go back to bret baier. bret, good to have you back with us. the latest information that you're hearing on this. >> hi, martha. we reviewed the search warrant and the list. what we haven't seen is the affidavit that supports this. that's really what would lay out the case that the magistrate's signed off on. the information that they were looking for that they specifically listed. in the search warrant, it does have u.s. code and what exactly they're saying he's under investigation for. that is technically potential obstruction of justice and violations of the espionage act. this is tssci, the highest level of classification short of special access, which is the nuclear materials specifically. tssci. there was one box in the set of 11 with classified materials

that is found with various classifications and tssci documents. they don't list exactly what is in there. now, we've been talking about you talked to kash patel and the declassification process. i listened closely. it's fascinating, this is unprecedented. usually when a president goes through this process, they deal with the director of national intelligence, the dni and there's a process. they say i'd like to declassify this and they say why it's yes or no. in this case, towards the end of his administration and you just heard kash patel say this, there was this broad sense that the president was declassifying all of these categories of documents. without that dni back and forth. that has not been tested in a court. the supreme court has not weighed in on that. by the constitution, the president has broad authority. he is essentially the executive branch to declassify documents. that hasn't really been tested.

that's an aside. the other thing that you talked about before is the june -- early june subpoena, the meetings. they know what they have. there's something that happens in june, maybe it's an informant, maybe it's a secret service agent that has said we've seen other things. as far as we can tell, there's no more communication. then there's an august 5 request for a search warrant from the magistrate, bruce rinehart. that time frame and then it takes days before this search or raid or whatever you want to call it happens at mar-a-largo, the urgency that is required to get all of that action and to get to that level doesn't match the time frame or the pieces of facts that we know currently. >> martha: indeed. bret, thanks very much. bret baier, outlining what we're now seeing in this search warrant that has been released. i want to bring in by phone mark

levin, host of "life, liberty and levin". a constitutional attorney and expert. thanks very much, mark. what goes through your mind as you listen to this so far and then i want to dig in with specific questions for you, if i may. >> i sit here as a former chief of staff to a former attorney general. if this is such a big deal, how come it took 18 months to figure out that this super secret information was in the home of the former president? now, they have some concerns starting in february. do almost nothing. they're negotiating with the president's lawyers. they're physically in the house apparently by subpoena in june, the fbi. they have access to the very same boxes presumably that they have access to under this search warrant. they're now leaking information about what they found that turns up classified information.

you know, when you have the highest level of secret information, if -- i've had to go through this -- you're supposed to track those documents. they have a special cover on them. did the government lose track of them? who lost track of them? the fbi? the cia? they're so damn important. that's my question. number 1. number 2, bret, you and others have said, between june and august a two-month period where literally nothing happened. i don't care if the president's lawyers are raising objections or not. you're just sitting there for two months and you do nothing? let me tell you what i think is going on here, martha. this is a pretext. this is a cover up. they wanted to get in that house, related to january 6. they're collecting additional information that they didn't have in june for before june. they get one shot. they wanted to get into that house. search warrant, so no lawyers are around, the president is not around. nobody can get in their way and

go through everything and anything they want. if they knew specifically what documents they wanted, then they should have asked for it and they would have gotten it. there's no way to stop them. even if the documents are declassified. we're wasting a lot of time on this. declassified or not declassified, if you're assertion that those documents belong to the government, documents that are not classified, that were created by the government, also belonged to the government. the vast majority of material the government has isn't classified. it's not skip material. this is all a pretext. this is all b.s. so if there's stuff that they knew was in mar-a-largo, you walk down to that courthouse, 24 hours after you were there in june and make your case to the judge and say holy macrol,

there's nuclear information in there. the u.s. attorney in washington d.c. has two grand juries going. one for the national archives, one for january 6. people need to focus on him. that guy. obviously he wanted to go through the back door with a search warrant in order to create this pretext that they're looking for classified information. what information? so i'm telling you as a former chief of staff, that stuff has special covers, it has special batch numbers. if it's nuclear information like the ridiculous "washington post" reported, then you would know that. if there's other information missing, then the agency that classified it and put the batch number on there, they would know it. there's no need for a broad search warrant to go in to the president's former home and grab everything you can. so i want people to understand,

don't chase the leaks. don't chase the government leaks. don't chase "the washington post." they're always wrong. just remember the leaks that took place during russia collusion and so forth and so on. the reason people are wondering what the hell took place here is because this is a phony argument that they're making. i'm not saying that there may not have been classified information or so forth, but that can't possibly be the reason for this search warrant in truth. i've talked about this. you've mentioned this. it's the plain view doctrine. get the hell in there, grab everything you can. it's our one shot so we can see if there's anything, anything that we can use against trump. this isn't about taking on trump with specific intent. you know what? if we were prosecuting people, taking classified documents, we'd be prosecuting every former attorney general of the united states, every former deputy

attorney general of the united states, every former president of the united states. i know it, the fbi knows it and they know it. this isn't the first president and the gsa is boxing this stuff up. there's a lot of chaos going in between transitions going from one to the next. you don't assume the president of the united states is going to sell this technology to the communist chinese. he's the president of the united states. he needs to be treated with respect. there's processes to be used. you don't go in the court looking for search warrants and send 30 fbi agents to a former president's house. you were just there two damn months earlier. what did you miss? i hope this clears things up. >> martha: great points, mark. the biggest one that jumps out is just this issue of if this is something that is so dire, why does it take so long to get in there and why did this judge say, you know, this is a pretty good affidavit you put together.

it's kind of scary. between now and august 19, which is the date he said they had to complete it by, you should see what you can find. quick question before i let you go, mark. it's this: it says that donald trump is under investigation for potential violations and the espionage act. that's the latest leak and maybe that's what it is and maybe it's to color this in a certain way what is your reaction if those are the charges potentially being discussed here. >> it would be the espionage act, if that's how far they want to go. if that's what they want to do, i want to know if any former attorney general of the united states has taken anything home. that act is very broad. let's be clear about this. it doesn't just apply to former presidents that might take classified information with them. it applies to a current attorney general that might take classified information home that he's not supposed to bring home.

it applies to individuals that might be rating classified information on airplanes and they're not supposed to be reading it on airplanes. ate plies to obama. it's funny. the national archives says we went through the 30 million documents and pages and there was nothing classified in it. are you kidding me? have you ever seen it done that quickly? they went through 30 million pages and found nothing classified? by the wayed, you have to make the jail in washington d.c. 100 times big tore lock up the officials and members of congress. i don't want to hear they're thinking of the espionage act. they'll have to drag hillary back, to. although the statute of limitations has run on her. >> martha: thanks, mark. we look forward to hearing with you throughout the an and evening as this story unfolds. mark levin, wonderful to have you here. thank you very much. with that, i want to bring in ari fleischer, fox news contributor and mick mulvaney.

president trump's former chief of staff. mick, let's started with you. this is what went from the white house to mar-a-largo and the process of understanding what was in the boxes and the back and forth with the department of justice. if this was so urgent, we're taking the espionage act here. what do you think is going on? >> i don't know. i don't think anybody knows. that's part of the problem. i don't think what merrick garland did yesterday helps solve that year dealing with a fog of war situation, which is just making things worse for in. the department of justice, and you talked about this earlier is uniquely situated to come forward by releasing the affidavit. we're guessing to why they were there or guessing the documents. we're guessing whether or not they went in to look for something, couldn't find that but found something else. was this a back door investigation to january 6.

there's a hundred questions that you folks have raised in the last hour and they're all really good questions. the affidavit could such much of that. it was the affidavit that the department of justice lied about when they got the fisa warrant to spy on the trump campaign six years ago. the affidavit is critical. it's the one thing that could set the record straight or start to set the record straight. we're now we're all guessing and guessing based on the pre-existing opinions of the department of justice. if you're a republican and a conservative and a trump supporter, you have reason to think that the department of justice is out to get donald trump, they did it in 201 sick and buried the hunter biden story and they have a track record that denies them the benefit of the doubt that the department of justice should ordinarily get. they need to release the affidavit. >> martha: so true. ari, what goes through my mind as you think about the pretext for the russia collusion investigation. you've got well, carter page is working for a foreign government. okay.

not true. they didn't say he was an agent. that he worked as an asset for the cia. that was covered up as part of the investigation. the dossier, we're told the dossier is not the only thing that they relied on to do this investigation. they had more. never learned what that was. the dossier fell apart. there wasn't anything else to support an investigation. that's why its so important and so vital, i think, to the country to see this affidavit. you must show this affidavit. you have to explain to people what is going on here. because what you've got is what i referred to before as a destruction of trust in these institutions that is very dangerous for the united states of america. ari, what do you think? >> the problem the doj and fbi have is that they have dirty hands. they have four years of dirty hands, this is exactly why they're not trusted by half this country. they got so much wrong, they had an fbi lawyer that was found to have doctored information in an

attempt to get a warrant against carter page. two of the four warrants that were sworn out against carter page were invalid. there's issues here with a department of justice and fbi that was out to get donald trump. having said that, do they have the goods on him this time? here's where i think doj has a wrenching decision to make. let's say everything we've been reading is true and they have documents that were top secret or code word documents that donald trump shouldn't have had. are they going to indict him? or is the government going to say we got our documents back. that's all that this was about and we're not going to indict the president. if they don't indict him, none of their evidence or none of their suppositions are supposed to become public. if you don't indict, you don't talk. so now it's all leaks from an unfair department of justice and the hands of joe biden, his political opponent. so doj put themselves in this terrible position. i'll say one last thing here. if indeed the president had

classified documents, they should have been returned to the government immediately. when the government came there in june, i don't know why they said put a lock on that room as opposed to saying no, we're talking them with us and negotiating it and getting it done. there's so much here that doesn't add up. the president shouldn't have had classify documents. he can't just willy-nilly raise his arm and declassify them. there's a process he has to go through. but doj has really put themselves in a box here and i don't know how they can get out of it. >> martha: great points. mick, you want to follow up? it's shocking -- as was pointed out before, there's facilities where you can store these documents. many people want them for their presidential libraries and all of these type things. we've seen this play out before with presidents that want to hold on to their stuff and are told that they can't do that for various reasons. so i guess the thing between

that and where we are now is the big gulp of what we don't know. if they don't indict, all of this is going to stay under wraps and the documents come back and then you have this potential for this drip, drip, drip. oh, this is what was in there. that's what was in there. poisonous to potential presidential process. >> a lot of what ari makes sense. here's the complete issue. was this about documents to begin with? was it something else? it's liberal legal analysts on other note works said if this is just about documents, it's extraordinarily dangerous. the president is outrageous. it can't be about just the documents. if it is, the department of justice is even more broken than i think it probably is. i've got a theory about washington d.c. which is don't ever consume a conspiracy where incomplete competence will explain things.

it may explain why they didn't tell the white house. there's a really good chance the department of justice realized that they made a mistake here. you can't send somebody in just for documents in to a former president's home. they didn't do that to hillary clinton. what hillary did was worse. hillary did something intentionally. these documents were in his basement. could you imagine if they had pictures of donald trump trying to set fire to these documents? that's what hillary clinton did. it's not even close. the documents make no sense. they thought that they had something else. they had to think that they had a smoking gun of some fashion. that's the only thing that would justify this risk of going into the building. the affidavit will show that. that's why i don't think you'll ever see it. >> martha, two points, if i may. one, if president trump didn't pack up those boxes if as reported the gsa packed up the boxes, it's very hard to seek

cullability for the president. donald trump never opened those boxes in mar-a-largo and has no idea what is in them. people said that donald trump didn't take a cia briefing. why do you think he's hunting around his basement reading files? the second point goes to hillary clinton. hillary exposed to nation to more danger. she had an electronic version that could be hacked from tehran or beijing. a physical document you have to get into mar-a-largo, which is not easy to do. hillary was not prosecuted. sandy berger cut a plea bargain deal for when he did steal national security documents from the national archives. if they go after donald trump for this, but they didn't go after sandy berger or hillary clinton, what fairness is there in our system? that is something that the doj has to wrestle with. >> if i can jump in, that's an excellent point, a new piece of information that since we've

been on the air that is unusual. there's some reports that the cases for the search warrant is the espionage act. we had been focusing on a different act, which is the one about mishandling of documents that can get you disqualified from office. it looks like that they might be using a different statute than going after hillary clinton. in 2701, the standard is willful, which i don't think they'll show it was willful. in a lot of the espionage act, you have to show that it hurts the u.s. or benefits a foreign nation. i'm not sure how that happens with that in his basement. they have real legal problems. this is not what they went looking for in the first place. they went looking for something else and found this and trying to use to it cover their tracts. >> martha: thank you both. thanks, mick mulvaney and ari.

we discussed the possible -- potential obstruction of justice and violations of the espionage act, which we'll continue to dig into. that's what we're being told is the is reason, the impetus, although we don't have the affidavit. back to david spunt now with the latest at the justice department. david, what are you learning now? >> martha, you said it yesterday on one of the shows that i mentioned things are quiet at the justice department. believe it or not with this going on, things are business as usual here at the department of justice. attorney general merrick garland is at work. i checked again today and asked about the affidavit. that's something that we want to see. a this point, the justice department not moving forward to put in a motion to release that. the former president overnight on truth social or before midnight specifically talked about the national archives and records administration accusing

former president obama of taking all of these archives and documents to chicago for his presidential library. i want to read a statement that we got within the last hour from the national archives. rare to see the national archives refuting a former president in real time. the national archives and records administration says that -- let me read here. assumed exclusive legal and physical custody of obama presidential records when president obama left office in 2017 in accordance with the presidential records act. the nara, national archives and records administration moved approximately 30 million pages of unclassified records to a facility in the chicago area where they're maintained exclusively by nara. nara maintains the classified obama presidential records in a nara facility in the d.c. area as required. former president obama has no control over where and how the

president stores the presidential records of his administration. that's coming from the national archives refuting this claim that former president obama, his predecessor took records with him in an inappropriate way to chicago where his presidential library is under construction right now. back to things at the department of justice. i told you at the beginning of the show, someone told me earlier this week, you know merrick garland. i don't know him that well. i've had several interactions with him. this is not something that he's going to release, release. it's extraordinary to get him in front of cameras yet. he felt an obligation to do so under pressure. now we want the affidavit. we want more. so fingers crossed that he will go for that. >> martha: the problem is what ari just said. if you don't get the affidavit, you'll have leaks and speculation. that would be a very untenuous place for the country to be in.

thanks, david. i'd like to bring in victor davis hanson, the hoover institution senior fellow. victor, as you hear about this potential obstruction of justice and violations of the espionage acted, what do you think is going on here? >> you played a clip of james comey. james comey was commenting on how hillary clinton violated the law of classified releases. she was not going to be punished. james comey went out on a private meeting with the president of the united states and memorialized it on fbi documents and deliberately leaked to it the media so they would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate trump, who was his close friend, robert mueller. it's been enzoes -- incestuous. always has been.

merrick garland say how dare you impugn the reputation of the doj and the fbi? no sooner that he left the stage that a leak came out of the doj or fbi that they were after nuclear secrets. we know that m.o. that sets off and deliberately sow the bomb shells, walls are closing in, hysteria on the left. no sooner had that leak emerged and "the washington post" ran with it, we have these tweets that donald trump is like the rosenberg. michael hayes would say, yes. that's how they operate. so the government leaks to preselected media. then who have a whole ally of media megaphones and they prep the case in the public sphere because they have no confidence on its merits. he said we have professionals. why are people impugning them?

attorney general garland, all you have to to is have the interim fbi directeder not lie four times to a federal investigator. don't have a top lawyer doctor an fbi affidavit. don't have the director of the fbi claim 245 times under oath that he can't remember. don't have him leak a confidential presidential memo to the media. i could go on. he acts as if all of a sudden people have just created this distrust out of nothing. people want to believe in the fbi. they want to believe in the doj. but what merrick garland is doing is undermining confidence. if we really believed him, he would have had that press conference and all of the points that have been made by your guest are valid, but we wouldn't have had a leak. we wouldn't have none anything about "nuclear secrets." that's a buzz word to get everybody inflamed. where did that information come from? it came from the fbi or the doj.

that's what we've seen for the last five years. that's how the government has been operating. it's got to stop. >> martha: it's a routine that has just mined people's trust in these institutions and for very good reason. we've seen millions and millions of dollars spent on investigations that went nowhere after it was over. victor, thanks very much. always great to have you with us. thank you. victor davis hanson. we want to go back to the justice department. the judge has ruled that the trump search warrant will be unsealed. back to david spunt. are they giving us any time frame? >> i think it's going to be momentarily. court documents are dock sequentially. the magistrate judge said done and ordered in chambers, west palm beach, florida. it's so ordered that the motion be granted to unseal the search warrant for mar-a-largo. so he's telling his staff to go

ahead and move forward. so we assume document number 42 in the order would be the actual release of this search warrant, can will tell us -- which will have charges on it as ari and mick mulvaney just mentioned. what those could be and also the rest of the content that we've been mentioning. this is coming momentarily, martha. >> martha: it will not necessarily be the affidavit, just to be clear. >> yeah. that a different thing. >> martha: the warrant that gives them the right to search. it's unsealed and we have it. we're starting to go through it right knew. david, you'll be going through it. bret and i will all be going through it. >> i'm looking at it right now. >> martha: bret was there was -- >> this is the same document. >> martha: this is the -- >> the same one.

as far as we can see, this is the seven pages of the search warrant and the list of documents that were taken from the home. so what they're doing is officially unsealing it. we've seen it a couple hours. we still don't have the affidavit. this judge action does not go down that road. that's a decision by the doj. as far as i can tell, we're not going to get the backup material to what we've been reported on. in this document, it does over the seven pages, the three pages have the list of the documents that they left. but the related possible violations of the statutes are in here. they include the espionage act, a law prohibiting the deinstruction and concealing of document to obstruct an investigation and the unlawful removal of government materials. these all in the search warrant. what we need is the justification for the search

warrant, which is listed in the affidavit, which has not been unsealed. this is just the official judge move on the unsealing of the warrant, which was -- we got through sources from the trump lawyers and others. >> martha: just going through this now. it is what we had in terms of what they got out, description of items. roger stone. everything that we've listed for you. this is the official release of this docket. we see the signatures by trump attorneys when it was received. they were done and this was handed to them at 6:19 p.m. we know they went in early in the morning around 6:00 a.m. so this is 12 hours later, this was signed saying look, here's everything we took. it's not an overly itemized list, i'd say, bret. it's just a box, a box, a binder of photos. miscellaneous top secret documents, which you can drive a

truck through. the descriptions of some of these things with what could be field in with leaks and everything else. we are trying to see what instigated the need for this raid. stand by. david spunt has something fresh for us. let's go back to david. >> hi, martha. as we're talking about it, i printed it here at the doj. it show as receipt of property. this tells you exactly what was taken. it says mar-a-largo, has the address on it. talks about four documents. talk about the boxes. it talks about an executive grant of clemency regarding roger stone, the president's long-time political confidant. a binder of photos and a handwritten note. it's curious under 10 a, it says

miscellaneous secret documents. miscellaneous top secret documents. miscellaneous confidential documents. that's kind of what it is. it's seven pages in total. the front page, let me find it here, this is the front page of the search and seizure. this is actually filled in. it explains a little bit about what the search is. it was signed as we've been talking about august 5. so one week ago last friday by magistrate judge bruce rinehart in the southern district of florida, a week later, we have it. the affidavit would be many more pages and have many more details. >> martha: in fact, it says on one of the first pages not including affidavit. >> exactly. >> martha: these clear. thank you very much. so now we have the official release on the court dockets. what we get from this is that we

can confirm what we got earlier is indeed the document that was reported to be, which is a list of what's there. that's where we are. bring bret back in as we move forward here. going through this discussion of classified, unclassified, who touched these boxes. why they were there in the first place. did the president know what was in any of these poxes. you can see this story will go on a long time, bret. >> very long time. it's important to reset here. we're talking about the highest level of classification of documents. if it was not declassified and we have to go through that, the president says he did and his people say that he had this broad declassification. the doj clearly is going after him in this investigation that they were classified and extremely sensitive. in some way, shape or form,

threatened national security. now, that's is the bottom line. we don't have exactly what's in these documents. they don't list that ever on any of these documents. what we really don't know is the difference between the urgency of this moment and the first subpoena, why don't they go back and ask for another subpoena. do they know what they're going after or did they find out there's tssci material in one of these boxes? who is the informant? do we care about that? or is that the person that tells them to go to a certain place? i think that the chain of timeline is the biggest part of this story now. other than to remind people that there is a seriousness to it. that there is a security element to it. on the back side, on the flip side, there's a politics element to it that trump critics will

push back hard. >> martha: that's what makes this a story that has huge ramifications as we're already in the heat of a mid-term election. the minute that is over, you'll be in the middle of a presidential race. this will play out. look back at 2016. the russia situation began during the election season there. you watch what the american people have gone through in the time period of the trump presidency and all of these cases which, you know, people had their hair on fire over. many of which turned out to be -- all of which turned out to be not prosecutable in the end. so now you have the sort of overhanging reality that this former president is considering very seriously running again for president. you have the involvement of the department of justice doing a raid at his house. it brings up all kinds of

connotations and parallels to what happened to hillary clinton, james comey. hillary had top secret material on the server, skiff material and we know how that was treated. what is missing here and we pointed out is that we don't know exactly what we don't know, right? and that is whether or not these documents involve something that is related to espionage, which is the strongest charge that is on this list that we just saw. >> i'm here on kiowa island. not because president biden is here. but if he would like to sit down and talk about this, we have cameras. we're here. just down the road. >> martha: well-positioned. >> yes. >> martha: as always. i don't know if there's any golf involved, but if there's an interview with president biden, we'll look to make some room for that on all of our air. bret, before i let you go,

remains to be seen, what the impact of this. president biden has kept this at an arm's length. we didn't know it was going to happen. we weren't given a heads-up on the raid. the executive office over sees the department of justice. we've seen cozy relationships in the past. this president is trying to put the message out there that he's not connected to this in any way for obvious reasons, i'd say, right? >> we haven't heard anything really from the white house. there's this arm's length distance. it will be interesting to see as this drags on. because it is going to whether this white house weighs in. more than they have. >> martha: so perhaps you can get an interview with hunter biden while you're there, too. he got on the plane as well, bret. >> never know. >> martha: maybe the whole family would like to sit down. we look forward to that. bret, thank you for being with us. >> sure. >> martha: all of this continuing coverage of this story is straight ahead.

that's "the story" for this friday. this story goes on for some time. see you back here monday at 3:00. "your world" is about to get underway as we look at a market that is taking off. it's at its highest level since may. that's good news. take care, everybody. thanks for being with us. see you next time. . >> charles: details that the fbi search warrant revealed as it officially released. are those posing more questions for former president donald trump or the department of justice? this is "your world." we have shannon bream, jonathan turley and bret baier coming up shortly. first, to david spunt who is at the justice department with the very latest. david? >> charles, this was just unsealed. fox news reviewed it more than an hour ago and matches what we