Endanger “the lives of hundreds of millions.”
Well, here is some further discussion by Tom Nichols on that issue found in
The Atlantic:
It’s been a bad week for nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The Russians are (yet again) imperiling Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, and in Florida, a former president of the United States has apparently been storing some of America’s most important secrets about nuclear weapons in his literal basement with nothing more than a few padlocks on the door.
…
Unnamed sources told The Washington Post that the search warrant for Trump’s home included “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons,” but that could mean almost anything. Nuclear issues could, and almost certainly would, sometimes be included in the President’s Daily Brief, a highly classified digest of the most important issues facing American leaders summarized in a single report every morning. Other documents, however, might include almost anything: budgets for modernizing America’s nuclear deterrent, proposals for new weapons, evaluations of enemy nuclear developments, the status of allied nuclear forces, and multiple other sensitive issues.
These nuclear-related materials are classified at stratospherically high levels. Although most people are familiar with categories such as “Secret” or “Top Secret” (TS) certain kinds of documents and reports are even more tightly controlled with additional categories such as SCI, for Sensitive Compartmented Information; CNWDI, for Critical Nuclear Weapons Design Information; and SAP, for Special Access Programs. According to The New York Times, Trump was holding documents marked TS/SCI, among other classifications.
Sitting presidents can see them all; contrary to popular belief, they do not have a security clearance. Instead, their election to the office means that they have the trust and confidence of the American people. Former presidents, however, have no such access, and when the Justice Department demanded that Trump return what he took, (including by subpoena), he failed to do so. This is something of a mystery in itself; Trump had already handed back 15 boxes of documents, but he dug in his heels on returning anything more.
…
I am concerned, in particular, by conversations I have seen (and some in which I have participated) on social media that suggest to me that Trump’s critics are letting their imaginations run away with them, including accusations that Trump has, or soon will, sell these secrets to America’s enemies.
Source:
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters ... s/671135/
Ok, I will try and not let my imagination "run away." Still, it begs the question, what was Trump planning to do with these documents?
Nichols argues that Trump was "worried about documents mixed in among other materials that could implicate him in various kinds of wrongdoing."
I think Nichols would agree that is hardly a good excuse for defending Trump's actions or suggesting that he be above the law.
Meanwhile,
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists also had an article on the matter:
The release of the search warrant was preceded and followed by a barrage of media revelations about the documents seized from the former president’s estate and the events that led to their seizure. Ahead of the raid on Mar-a-Lago, the Washington Post reported that the FBI had sought “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons” in the search. The subsequent unveiling of the search warrant and inventory of items seized did not detail precisely what documents had been taken from the ex-president’s control or suggest specifically that any of them were related to nuclear weapons.
But one item in the inventory was labelled “[v]arious classified/TS/SCI documents,” indicating that it included “top secret/sensitive compartmented information,” which is not intended to be viewed outside a secure government facility, the New York Times reported. In all, the FBI retrieved 11 sets of documents marked as confidential, secret, or top secret from Trump’s Florida estate.
The Post’s report that agents had been looking for documents relating to nuclear weapons set off a storm of speculation about how nuclear weapons information is kept secret, and whether Trump would have violated any laws if he did take nuclear weapons information to his Florida estate. Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein provided authoritative commentary in a lengthy Twitter thread on the difference between the classification of national defense information and the system of keeping nuclear weapons information—technically known as “restricted data”—secret. “It would be interesting if the documents in question did have Restricted Data in them, though,” Wellerstein tweeted. “Because while it has been established that a POTUS can declassify national defense information at will, RD is an entirely different category of secrecy, a parallel legal system.”
Source:
https://thebulletin.org/2022/08/searchi ... t-heading
Not to mention that Trump is no longer the President of the United States. Apparently, Trump has claimed that he declassified the material while he was still president. He has also claimed that the documents were planted on his estate by the FBI. Not exactly statements that are easy to reconcile with each other, but then logical coherence was never Trump's strong suit.