The Espionage Act is one of the laws being investigated by the Department of Justice, according to the warrant that was made public on Friday.
The removal of information pertaining to the US national defense is one of the aspects of the Espionage Act.
Several boxes were seized from the Mar-a-Lago home of the former president. The former president's Florida residence was the location for the FBI agents to take top secret documents and confidential material.
Sources told The Washington Post that the FBI was looking for classified documents during the raid.
According to the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, the Espionage Act of 1917 prohibits the sharing of information that could hurt the US or give an advantage to other foreign countries.
Section 793 of the act deals with gathering, transmitting or losing defense information, which relates to any document relating to national defense that was illegally removed from its proper place of custody.
The maximum penalty for violating the Espionage Act is 10 years in federal prison.
It's not clear if Trump used a specific process to declassify the documents, but he hasn't been charged with a crime.
Trump could be in violation of the act due to the sensitive nature of the materials seized from his Mar-a-Lago home.
If reports are accurate and contained among these documents are some of the most highly classified information our government holds, then it would explain why the department and the FBI took the step of obtaining a warrant to recover the documents.
"It appears that the FBI wanted to take those documents to a safe location, but Trump wouldn't let them go," he said. It is a risk to our national security to have information of such a classification sitting in an unguarded location. The FBI would work quickly to minimize the risks of disclosure if any other person had that kind of information.
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