Trump's ex-chief of staff said it's hard to understand how such highly classified documents ended up at Mar-a-Lago and that they are 'not accidentally moved anywhere'

• Some of items recovered at Trump's Mar-a-Lago were classified TS/SCI, court records said.
• Mick Mulvaney said such records are so "serious" that folks are supposed to track their location.

A former chief of staff to President Donald Trump said it's hard to understand how some the classified documents that were said to have been seized from Mar-a-Lago ended up there.

Mick Mulvaney, who served as Trump's acting chief of staff from January 2019 to March 2020, appeared on CNN Friday to discuss the materials that were seized during the August 8 raid on Trump's Florida residence. According to court records, the FBI recovered 11 sets of classified documents.

When asked if he was concerned about the documents, Mulvaney said one thing that caught his attention was that among the list of recovered materials were items labeled Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information, or TS/SCI, which requires the highest levels of security clearance.

"That's the serious stuff," he said, adding "that's not supposed to be there."

"That being said, it's really hard to understand how it gets there in the first place. These things are not accidentally moved anywhere," Mulvaney continued. "These documents are marked. They are clearly known to folks to be TS/SCI and there's supposed to be folks tracking where they are."

Trump has denied any wrongdoing and said he had a "standing order" to declassify all documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to his residence, though former Trump administration officials, including Mulvaney, have cast doubt on that claim.

Others have wondered if classified information was transported from the White House to Mar-a-Lago inadvertently during the hectic final days of Trump's term as he dealt with his impending second impeachment, the fallout of the Capitol riot, and his ongoing attempts to challenge the 2020 election.

Insider's Hannah Getahun previously reported classified government documents typically have brightly colored cover sheets that are hard to miss and meant to be removed if the material is declassified or destroyed.

Despite his concerns with the prospect of TS/SCI documents at Mar-a-Lago, Mulvaney said he wasn't sure it was "enough to justify a search warrant."

When CNN host Alisyn Camerota pressed him to explain, Mulvaney said a search warrant is only justified if it's an "emergency."

"If the evidence is that either someone is going to see it who shouldn't, or if the evidence is going to disappear to be destroyed or be moved," he said. "There's an urgency to a search warrant that goes above just a subpoena."

Mulvaney also said last week that he hopes his former boss does not run for president in 2024 as he thinks Trump is the only Republican who could lose to a Democrat.