“The only reason to leak to the media is to influence the narrative, which tells you this is being politicized, which is doing damage to the FBI, the Justice Department, to important institutions to our country,” he said.
Rubio’s interview with Fox News came a day after the Washington Post printed a report, based on what “people familiar with the matter” told the paper, claiming that among the classified files kept by Trump at the Palm Beach mansion was a document describing a foreign country’s national defenses, including its nuclear arsenal. That could be one of eight other nations, including the UK, France, Russia, China, the DPRK, Pakistan, India, or Israel - the report did not say which.
“Only the president, some members of his Cabinet or a near-Cabinet-level official could authorize other government officials to know details of these special-access programs,” the Post said, citing “people familiar with the search, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive details of an ongoing investigation.”
The FBI seized hundreds of files last month from Mar-a-Lago, along with hundreds more that Trump voluntarily returned in January at the urging of the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). More than 300 of them were marked with various levels of classification.
On Monday, a federal judge in southern Florida assigned a “special master” to sort through the files and decide if any should be excluded because of attorney-client privilege or Executive Privilege.
While Trump has ripped into the basis of the FBI’s investigation, calling it variously a hoax and a witch hunt, Rubio on Wednesday restricted his criticisms to the way some members of the investigation were leaking information to the press that the DOJ had officially refused to publicly comment on.
“[L]et's understand that all of this information is coming from one side and one place … the FBI and the Justice Department, and they are leaking to the media,” Rubio told Fox & Friends on Wednesday.
“So, generally when there's an investigation by the FBI or Justice Department, they're not even acknowledging there is an investigation, much less leaking,” Rubio noted, adding that investigators from the Mar-a-Lago case “every single day are strategically leaking information - that can't be rebutted, by the way, or in any way analyzed - for a reason.”
Rubio, who is a member of the “Gang of Eight” senior lawmakers who are included in security briefings, rejected the Washington Post’s claim that cabinet officials could know what was in the documents.
“That’s not the way classification works,” he said. “Classification is based on both the compartment - the way it’s classified, at what level - and then the need-to-know basis.”
He also noted that the Gang of Eight was never alerted to the FBI’s investigation of the Mar-a-Lago documents, which he would have expected, given the claimed seriousness of the infraction by Trump.
“Never once were we ever approached and told ‘there is this massive brewing counterintelligence threat to the United States and we want to make you aware of it,'” Rubio said.
No charges have been pressed against Trump, but the warrant unsealed by a federal judge late last month revealed that FBI investigators feared the improper storage of classified files at Mar-a-Lago after Trump left office could potentially violate the 1917 Espionage Act as well as laws against the improper handling of documents and obstruction of justice. The FBI has only released a vague inventory of what was taken from Mar-a-Lago, with no hint as to their subject matter.