How many classified documents did the FBI find in its search of Mar-a-Lago earlier this month? Today the New York Times provides a pretty good estimate, though they leave the arithmetic to us:
January: "more than 150."
June: "a few dozen more."
Total: "more than 300."
At a best guess, this means the August haul was somewhere around 100 documents, which fits the Times' description of the number as "scores."
So: the FBI got 100 more classified documents in its August search, including one set that "had the highest level of classification, top secret/sensitive compartmented." And there may be more to come as the FBI continues its review.
POSTSCRIPT: Note that a single document can be many pages long. So if you see something like "over a thousand pages of classified information were seized," it doesn't necessarily contradict anything here.
In a good world, this would prompt a complete rethink of the rationales for secrecy and the dynamics of secrecy. All of that was improvised for the Manhattan Project, and all that has happened since is that it has been hardened and specialized randomly, according to the internal incentives of the nat-sec organizations.
We do have a "Deep State"; but it is ineffectual. This is the worst of all worlds.
Found Assange's burner.
We'll know for sure if he responds by calling me ( ( ( montytheclipartmongoose ) ) ).
Heaven forbid we just hold a rich white guy accountable for breaking the law. No, no, no! The fact that a rich white guy who explicitly campaigned on the importance of handling government documents properly then went on to criminally mishandle government documents means we should rethink why we even need to handle government documents properly at all. ::facepalm::
Also: apparently only the US needs to declass everything.
Wikileaks never got any push from theintercept types to expose FSB, Mossad, etc.
Like + 25!
Amber's correct.
But also, whether in our judgement something "deserves" to be classified is, in itself, an amateur judgement.
When I was working with Secret/SCI materials routinely, the information I gleaned was almost always laughably trivial. So why classify it? I'll tell you why:
The fact that we could know this stuff at all would reveal sources and methods and permit our adversaries to design countermeasures.
why the hell would trump stealing a bunch of classified documents (the contents of which we know nothing about) prompt anyone to "a complete rethink of the rationales for secrecy". the argument is beyond nonsensical.
Because Donald Trump is the Peaceman, & in Donald Trump's dovish vision for the world, secrecy is unnecessary.
The thing is, even if you buy that Donald Trump took office, looked around and said, "Holy crap, we classify a bunch of useless junk!" Why did he then sign a law to INCREASE the penalties for mishandling government documents? He was literally in a position to formally reform the classification system and associated penalties, and he didn't do anything of the sort.
Loose lips sink ships. Boxes of classified documents are the proverbial loose lips. Treasonous.
Two things can be true.
One, the government overclassifies everything.
Two, in what world does an ex-president need even a single classified document? Especially, one with giant pursed lips.
Also, in this realm,
One, the FBI is acting with professionalism, and by the book, in this case.
Two, the FBI is a POS organization. It gets so much wrong it's not funny and it's history is rife with horribleness.
I'd say that's a pretty good overview of the long and short of it.
Smashing invisible Like button.
We keep over looking the obvious, of course
1 They should NOT have been there
2 The Director of the national archives is a Trump lover appointee so he cannot be trusted.
3 Trump is guilty of the same thing he accused HRC of, but doesn't seem to care
And of course Trumps legal team is showing their ineptitude:
"Former President Donald Trump reportedly released a new document very late Monday night that legal experts believe is incredibly damning.
Far-right writer John Solomon, who is one of Donald Trump's official representatives for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), released a May 10 letter on his JustTheNews.com website.
Solomon released a letter from NARA to Trump's lawyers.
"As you are no doubt aware, NARA had ongoing communications with the former President’s representatives throughout 2021 about what appeared to be missing Presidential records, which resulted in the transfer of 15 boxes of records to NARA in January 2022," the letter read. "In its initial review of materials within those boxes, NARA identified items marked as classified national security information, up to the level of Top Secret and including Sensitive Compartmented Information and Special Access Program materials. NARA informed the Department of Justice about that discovery, which prompted the Department to ask the President to request that NARA provide the FBI with access to the boxes at issue so that the FBI and others in the Intelligence Community could examine them."
Experts were stunned.
"Yikes," tweeted Tufts Prof. Daniel Drezner. Washington Post reporter Olivier Knox said, "this is incredible."
Attorney Bradley Moss wondered, "Does [John Solomon] realize how bad that letter is for Trump?"
"Trump not only had classified records at Mar-a-Lago, not only had TS/SCI classified records, he had Special Access Program classified information," Moss explained. "Those are our most sensitive secrets. They were sitting in a damn basement."
Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti said, "The letter also confirms that Trump was on notice that the documents he possessed were federal government property and that he needed to return them to the government’s possession. Very uphill battle for Trump’s team."
Justin Baragona, a correspondent for The Daily Beast, explained, "The best part of this is that John Solomon posted the letter because he thinks it is extraordinarily damning for the Biden White House. (Or he's at least trying to preemptively frame it that way for Trumpworld.)"
"I'm trying to figure out why John Solomon thought this letter would help Trump," Kanefield wrote. "I'm stumped."
University of Law Prof. Steve Vladeck wrote, "The May 10 letter from NARA is damning to former President Trump on any number of levels — not the least of which is the lack of any reference to a claim by Trump’s representatives that he had *declassified* any of the classified materials that were quite specifically at issue."
"It’s also telling that, even though this letter really hurts the Trump version of events, it wasn’t released by the Biden Administration or NARA. It was released by Trump’s own team—both a self-inflicted wound and further proof of how the government has been playing by the rules," Vladeck added.
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Eastwood, Giulianni, Solomon.
Just how incompetent can one group of people be?
Are they incompetent storytellers? Because that is what they really are, never mind what it says on their business cards.
Yes, they are. It doesn’t matter to the cult, which believes obvious bullshit as long as it comes from their demigod and his spokesmorons. But it’s not convincing anyone else. TFG’s support, always a minority, is slipping away. He lost the popular vote by over two million in 2016, over seven million in 2020. Maybe Kevin will draw us a trend line through 2024.
The point is, it seems, that everything here, and everything they've written in legal filings, is phrased as if he's still president, and everyone else is an illegitimate authority.
He'll maintain this view, and his cultists will maintain this view, until he dies, which is why he now thinks if they try to charge him the cities will erupt in violent chaos until they're forced to release him and beg his forgiveness.
He is always trying to associate the elections he's participated in with the ideas of sacredness and sanctity, hard to back down from that.
One thing that rarely gets mentioned is that there are a lot of independent "classifying authorities" in the federal government. The whole structure was established by presidential executive order, with EO 13556, issued by Pres. Obama on Nov. 5 2010 being the most recent version in effect.
DoD is a classifying authority, the Army, Navy and Air Force are classifying authorities, State, etc. And you don't talk about YOUR classified data to anyone from another classifying authority EVER. (Well, hardly ever...)
The Clinton email scandal is the only cross-authority review I'd ever heard of. And the funny thing is that it was only able to occur because the Clintons had a well designed and managed email server. State's own email servers were a mess and completely incapable of structured retrieval of old emails.
The reason I know this is that SoS Colin Powell realized this back in the oughts and tried to get money to replace States ancient computer museum collection. My company was in on one of the proposals. He didn't get the money, and the descriptions of the systems around 2016 sounded like nobody else did either.
Thanks for these details! Also, you left out the Department of Energy, which is responsible for the nukes. As we know, former TX Guv Rick Perry was all for abolishing DoE, until he became its Secretary -- and was amazed that this was where the nuclear weapons, etc. were made and controlled.
It's fascinating to watch in real time how the Trumpropaganda machine creates a wholly dishonest, evidence-free narrative. Based on the NARA letter published today by John Solomon, the machine is blaring that 'Biden lied about not knowing about the raid on Mar-a-Lago, he was in fact deeply involved'. Some are claiming it's grounds for impeachment.
This has two of the features that are typical of Trumpropaganda. Firstly, it's a squirrel. Whether or not Biden knew about the raid in advance is a trivial matter quite irrelevant to the issues raised in the FBI investigation. But the right mastered a long time ago the art of seizing on trivia and pretending it was a scandal.
Secondly, the claim is a lie. The references to Biden in the letter are to his waiver of executive privilege on the material which Trump voluntarily handed back in January, thus allowing the NARA to give the FBI access. As the letter points out, this was nothing but a formality, because Trump had no valid claim of executive privilege in the first place. But it's a long letter with many many big words and complex clauses, so Trump cultists will never read it. They'll see that Biden is named in it, and be instantly convinced of what every Trumpropaganda website has told them: lyin' Biden was in this investigation up to his neck.