Somebody at the Wall Street Journal got a peek at the list of stuff the FBI took from Mar-a-Lago on Monday:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation agents took around 20 boxes of items, binders of photos, a handwritten note and the executive grant of clemency for Mr. Trump’s ally Roger Stone, a list of items removed from the property shows....The list includes references to one set of documents marked as “Various classified/TS/SCI documents,” an abbreviation that refers to top-secret/sensitive compartmented information. It also says agents collected four sets of top secret documents, three sets of secret documents, and three sets of confidential documents. The list didn’t provide any more details about the substance of the documents.
Huh. That sounds harmless, doesn't it? And anyway, as Trump said, “The government could have had whatever they wanted, if we had it.”
I've avoided commenting on this whole fiasco since we have so little real information about what's going on, but I have to admit it's fascinating. Did Trump just gather up random stuff and take it with him without looking at it? Did he consider nuclear protocols and whatnot to be great keepsakes? Beats me. Even by Trump standards this is really hard to make sense of.
I don't know it sounds pretty Trumpian to me. Information that he might be able to sell or use as leverage against someone is as Trumpian as it gets.
I'm sure that's it - he just grabbed a bunch of important-looking documents to hang on to until he figures out some way to use them to his advantage or profit. He certainly didn't READ the darn things.
Apart from the money, sounds like Pfc Manning under direction from Assange.
Clearly, LOCK HIM UP!
But unlike Reality Winner & Chelsea Manning, El Jefe is not a woman. & very much like Edward Snowden, he is a man.
Therefore, I expect Reporters without Borders to name El Jefe Person of the Year 2022.
el jefe is male. a man? not so much ...
You're just trying to emasculate El Jefe because he is internally strong enough to support peace, & his compromising of nuclear secrets is just the latest illustration of his turn as Donald the Dove.
Being a peaceman is being feminized to a neoliberal fascist.
“… grabbed a bunch of important-looking documents to hang on to until he figures out some way to use them. He certainly didn't READ the darn things…”
Sounds right to me. I also think he took a bunch of stuff *just in case* there might be something in there that makes him look dumb/incriminating/hurt his chances next election cycle.
El Jefe randomly took the pardon notes for hid boi, Roger Stone.
Yup. Sounds reasonable.
This is really silly nonsense. The Russians and Chinese do not pay tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars for these secrets. When you see real spy cases, the amounts are at most hundreds of thousands. But it is not worth it for Trump to fool around with this stuff for the cost of a week's upkeep of Mar A Lago.
In addition, how could they transfer the money to Trump without it being seen?
I assume that Trump thought he might get some money from a foreign power for some of it and just grabbed what he could during his last couple of weeks. Or exchange such documents for a favor like putting his name on a building in Saudi Arabia or Russia.
The article still doesn't say if the only thing DOJ was doing was retrieving documents. The warrant would have said if it was it part of some thing bigger? Since I think Garland is a pussy, I assume it wasn't, but hey - he can always prove me wrong.
Two billion dollars for Jared's hedge fund from the Saudis.
One possible scenario:
The Saudis want a bomb. They know the Iranians will eventually get one so they want one too. Contained in these top secret files is information on the infrastructure needed to build such weapons and thus will allow them to build bombs quickly. Through the Kushner bribe and the LIV golf events, they now have access to such information because it's at Mar-a-Lardo. How did the FBI know that such secrete information was there unless someone told them? Someone who knew what those files contained and were sensitive enough to draw the FBIs and the DOJ's immediate attention to the point where a public search was conducted, not just a supoena?
Prolly a Deep Cover Pro-Castro Miami Cuban on the resort staff got wind of information being sold & narc'd to the feds.
Would not surprise me if one of the Secret Service agents said "This isn't right."
Just takes one with morals and a conscience and a sense of right and wrong.
Just one.
One of the SS on El Jefe's detail?
Fat chance.
They prolly helped pack the boxes.
Seems unlikely that anyone in the White House (and especially the president) would have natural access to that kind of information. My guess is the nuclear part of his trove of documents would relate to assessments of nuclear capabilities and so forth. If the Saudis want a bomb, I think they’d just buy one.
yeah and i don't think building one is much of a secret 77 years after the first one was dropped. getting the materials might be problematic and more the stumbling block than the how-to.
came here to say this.. Jared is out of power now and has nothing to offer the Saudis, except for stolen US secrets. That deal never made much sense to me until now..
More likely Donald just wanted some documents labeled “top secret” he could show to his banal rich buddies to impress them. Remember the Trump doctrine: “when confronted with multiple explanations for any specific Trump action, the truth usually lies in picking the most banal stupid explanation that makes the least sense”.
This is actually believable.
Wanting to make sense of what's going on in that squirrel brain (no offense to squirrels intended) is a fool's errand, Kevin.
Everybody sploot now...
(ooohhhh....Just Pictured Trump splooting...not pretty)
Eewwwww.
The left likes to caterwaul about Neoliberal Nancy Pelosi invoking the need for the US government to have normal Republicans in office, when all she means is things returning to how they were when Howard Baker's slampiece Nancy Kassebaum could be something other than a RINO. In Kevin Drum's world, though, we're already there, because Donald Trump & his acolytes are normal Republicans.
When is some journalistic genius going to put down the quotation notepad long enough to ask some questions like "who at the White House actually moved the boxes? Shouldn't they be questioned? What about the so-called "transition teams"? Were they involved? Where were these documents stored in the White House?
And above all: what valid reason could trump possibly have had for taking top secret documents out of the White House in the first place?
There is a SCIF in the White House - the Situation Room. One was also set up in Mar-a-Lago (and presumably decommissioned now - I hope). Things like “Various classified/TS/SCI documents,” should only be kept and referenced in a SCIF - and there are very strict handling rules based on Executive order 13526, an update issued by President Obama in late 2019. Every department in the Executive that deals with sensitive information has it's own classification instructions based on 13526, customized for the information they handle, but all with the same general rules and structure.
Moving SCI information between SCIFs is very carefully done. In pre-internet days, secure couriers might transfer paper documents (and a lot of authorization signing and acknowledgements and secured document bags). I understand that very carefully secured, encrypted, and isolated networks may be allowed these days. Probably with a lot of updated safeguards and authorizations required.
Ooops - late 2009!
“Executive order 13526, an update issued by President Obama…”
Trump probably took a piss on that EO, defiling it like he defiled everything Obama touched.
Re: MaLg SCIF. And yet ... the docs were taken from a storage room and the former guy's office and bedroom, according to reports. NOT the SCIF. No indication that proper handling procedures were used, either.
And the count is upt to "about 20 boxes."
The transition team?
So, it's Biden's fault?
Why worry, I'm sure he showed them all to his friends while he was in the White House....
Reading Dig y’s blog this morning I got this:
“Details of a foreign country’s nuclear plans? That’d be a SAP *and* probably what’s known as SCI, “Sensitive Compartmented Information,” the designation usually for protecting “sources and methods.”
Obviously how we know about other countries’ secrets would be SCI.…”
I suppose that information could be useful in blackmail. Apparently there was also some information regarding the French President. This would explain, to me at least, why Trump wanted this stuff.
The two best reasons - the most Trumpy reasons - are keepsakes and blackmail. I don't think he's the kind of guy who would just sell the stuff to the highest bidder.
Also, I'm betting that a few months ago, he signed documents saying he didn't have any of this stuff.
Regardless of what's in them, and how sensitive it is:
Those documents weren't his. He stole them. He is a thief.
“I don't think he's the kind of guy who would just sell the stuff to the highest bidder.”
Right. Trump isn’t a man who loves money, nor does he have any debts to repay.
I don’t think he would just auction them off. These documents are either sensitive enough that he could threaten to release them if he would be prosecuted or else trade them to Russia as a way to revive the dormant Trump Tower Moscow deal if the cash flow from his current grifts starts to dry up.
Can we impeach him again?
Absolutely, there's no limit. But if you had a hundred witnesses to him murdering someone, you still wouldn't more than four Republican senators to vote to convict. What a bunch of weasels they are. (It's just an expression, no offense intended to the critter.)
"wouldn't get more than"
He could shoot McConnell dead at the Senate podium and most of the Republicans would vote not to impeach and bar from office.
Honestly, if he shot McConnell dead, he might get a lot of Democrats to not vote for his impeachment too.
If we're going to speculate, the way to do that is to try to consider Mango's motivations.
- Power
- Fear
- Money
- Adulation
So, blackmail material (both individual and of various entities, including the federal government), and things of value to competitive nation states.
We know the Sauds are really hungry for technical nuclear information, although deployment and process info, as well as other countries' secrets are surely also of interest to them. So this might have been a subject of negotiation, which might also explain the urgency.
Another thing to consider is his weird obsession with North Korea. He clearly loves the idea of that sort of absolute power, even over a shithole. So the question would be what could Kim Jong Un most want, and have to offer?
Remember that the warrant was signed by the chief of counterintel.
North Korea is the one place you could imagine offering him asylum.
Bingo. Only I think Putin would be happy to have the papers in exchange for a luxury dacha on the Black Sea. Don’t drink the tea, though.
While I hope the entire Trump clan vanishes into the media black hole that is North Korea, I seriously cannot imagine Trump moving there voluntarily. He must know that they don’t have social media, fast food, or any of the other “luxuries” of the modern world.
All he knows is love, a love that will follow him for the rest of his life.
Once he found out the NSA had gotten hold of the secret recipe for KFC he couldn't stop himself, just kept stuffing it in.
He had to take to docs with him because his microdot camera has been stuck in the shop waiting on parts. Supply chain and all that…
Same shop as Hunter Biden's Macbook?
He is under investigation for espionage for stealing classified docs. Here is a handy timeline of how nice the government was for months on end. https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/09/politics/doj-investigation-trump-documents-timeline/index.html
Such low expectations for Trump. I'm disappointed in Mr. Drum's post. He who hates on Fox News just repeated their talking point. Trump didn't mean anything by this error. He just put some stuff in boxes and never really even knew what it was. It's no big deal.
Shame on Mr. Drum!
Trump is an evil treasonous terrorist spy like, you know, Rosenberg. He should get the same fate too.
When you consider that Drum cut his blogging teeth as an Iraq WARBLOGGER & is a longtime believer in Brad de Long & Meghan Mc Cardle's brilliance, the fact he sympathizes with El Jefe is not a surprise.
Must have been a different de Long than I read these days to be bracketed with McMeghan.
Seems to me, that if the Trump argument is that he declassified everything he intended to take with him to MAL, then, rather than running afoul of laws re mishandling of classified documents, he's admitting that he deliberately violated the PRA.
Claiming the 5th won't save him; he's damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.
"Donald, did you sell secrets to the Arabs, Chinese and most awesomely, your buddy Putin?????"
" Wahahahs, I did, I don't know who I am anymore ".
Ivanka: "we have gender reassignment scheduled for November".
This starts a flood of "right wing conservative" men to admit they are really women. Just as I suspected .
Now that's funny, darkly.
Why has everyone overlooked the obvious--NFTs? Trump secretly "declassified" the documents as president (that itself was a top secret) and he was planning to offer each document as an NFT in exchange for cryptocurrency or rubles.
Ticks all the boxes. I think you got it.
FWIW, I have it on decent authority that things like nuclear secrets are classified by statute, and that means that the President does not have at-will authority to declassify them.
Yep that's correct Doctor Jay. Trump IS toast.
The FBI also recovered albums of photographs.
Of what?
The imagination provides only so many answers before one of them has to be true.
I’m betting pictures of numerous Republican politicians in compromising positions.
Molesting 14 year old girls.
No lies detected.
I expect they were sitting right there on top of the nuclear documents, so they took them too. Didn't want to overthink it.
That's actually in the warrant, anything seemingly stored with, or in some association with, what they're looking for can be taken too.
Rumors of Greene(berg) being a lesbo is popping up as well.
As much as I would love, I mean, truly love, for some of the analysis here or at, say, Dailey Kos to be true, and have this jackass well and truly f-ed over, the main problem is, being Trump, we know the following.
1. What are the odds the guy read any documents during his four years? I mean, other than the receipt maybe taped to the top of a Big Mac box or one that slipped in the bag? I find the speculation that Trump analyzed a document for purposes of anything to be competely inconsistent with how he operates. For example, take the Eastman memo on overthrowing the government on 1/6, I bet there is no actual proof Trump even read it.
2. That said, since he's spending so much time there, I would not rule out that he had the documents there prior to leaving the white house. Since the transition was a joke, no one probably did the standard job of "he, what government properety v. personal property is at the White House, Camp David, in this case Mar a Lago, etc.
3. So he leaves, and there are boxes and boxes down there. It is completely in Trump's personality to give exactly zero rat's ass about any leftover documents. Sure, he might have intentionally kept them, but that would have required reading them in the first place. It would take someone at least six months to actually review 27 banker's boxes of documents, as if Trump is going to look at any of it.
4. Similarly, he would make it a point of pride to ignore any request to return them. Complying with requests is for suckers and losers.
That's my worry, sure, they will be classified, sure, if someone else (think Sandy Berger) tried to "take them" it would be criminal, but for the Orange Jackass, at one point they were properly there, and simply not returning them on time is going to be a nothing burger.
Plus, the FBI, and all normal people, have no choice but to retrieve them. Its assymetric duty.
This is pretty plausible. It it might well be what the recent visit to Mar-a-Lago was about - establishing that the documents represent a danger to the United States, and that he has been unambiguously asked to hand them over and refused.
That they didn't mention criminal charges could follow...or maybe they did, and he thought they were bluffing.
This bed is entirely of his own making.
Ok, but then why was Trump stomping around complaining about somebody wearing a wire or wiretapping him? Maybe that was just disinformation?
Again, you just excused his behavior. Trump is brilliant and ruthless. He’d do anything for money and he manipulated the deep state into giving him all he needs to blackmail them all. Trump isn’t stupid. He’s evil. Exterminate him. It does us no good to believe he’s stupid and naive. Goodness!
trump is chance gardener born to a wealthy family. if he had to fend for himself, he'd have starved
Some were marked TS-SCI. They would not have normally been allowed to sit anywhere, especially given that MAL had a SCIF specifically for viewing TS-SCI.
He deliberately took these out and held onto them.
the whole thing is confusing, but as per Trump's Razore, when trying to figure out trump's motivations, the stupidest possible scenario that can be reconciled with the available facts and that answer is likely correct. so i think he might just have decided to take some random shit and then refused to return it just to be an asshole.
Like +10.
Documents with ostentatious classified markings on them are always great to have laying around where you can casually wave them at
suckersinvestors, and anyone else who might wander in.Yep, and this is even more succinct than my post above.
Does anyone think that if it were possible to have Marine One, just sitting on the lawn at Mar a Lago that he wouldn't do it? I'm surprised he didn't steal the Presidential China (maybe that's next week).
So yeah, you got some sort of a safe room and 27 boxes of documents with "Top Secret, for Presidential Eyes Only" labels, in red, on each, and Trump just walks through there on the way to dinner with some rubes "yeah, still have some of those around."
Its completely plausible. Unfortunately more plausible than actually knowing what's in the boxes and planning to use them.
donnie has already shown us, at least two times, how he blackmails. Ukraine and Georgia (the state).
Does one think the Feds have found all the "hiding" places? I would suggest disassembly of all the structures at Mar Lardo.
Ivana's crypt, too.
To me, Trump’s motivations are always what benefits him. In this case if you assume “blackmail” it all fits neatly.
Yes after news that some of the material pertained to the President of France, that's my assumption.
You might be right, but he's still guilty of taking top secret documents. It doesn't matter what his motives are. He's guilty. Period.
he's certainly guilty, but motive also matters. if he did actually share the info or planned to share the info with a foreign government he'd be guilty of an even more serious crime with more severe penalties.
At the risk of but not seeking whataboutism, but looking to provide some context on the levels of classification, a past missive touching upon on classification: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/07/hillary-clinton-never-came-close-compromising-national-security/
In other words , focus only on that beyond top secret.
And another interesting read from the hits searching for “top secret site:motherjones.com”
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsberg-limitations-knowledge/
Yes, over classification is a real problem....
Someone sends you an newspaper article about drones or black sites or...., and that would be considered a "top secret" document.
But there's a world of difference between Hillary's e-mail and what Trump did.
Just how consequential having those documents unsecured at Mar-a-Lago was--I don't know. The government really can't talk about what exactly was there, and that's even more the case if there was very sensitive information there. Not sure who leaked the "nuclear" issue--I just hope it's not a wild exaggeration.
In the receipt there are two entries for Confidential Documents and one for Miscellaneous Confidential Documents.
Isn't that the term used for private person's information, like their tax documents?
Who has he been shaking down?
Images of the warrant and receipt,
https://twitter.com/SeamusHughes/status/1558178134410788864/photo/1
Apparently he would just ask his intelligence briefers if he could keep things and they couldn't refuse,
https://twitter.com/costareports/status/1558201509996806144
Private personal information? No. I used to work in the nuclear weapons complex; there were lots of nuke-related Confidential documents.
Both can be true.
Then there is the mystifying DOE "Q" clearance. It's roughly equivalent to a DoD Top Secret clearance. One time, when I went to visit a DOE facility, our security officer had to jump through a bunch of hoops to get them to accept my TS clearance.
Q is Hugh Everett III. (The real Hugh, AKA Mark Oliver Everett's dad, not the Disqus commenter.)
Secret and Top Secret refer to information that would potentially damage the security of the nation if released. Confidential is material that would damage individuals but not the nation if released.
TOP SECRET: "exceptionally grave damage" to national security if made publicly available.
SECRET: "serious damage" to national security if it were publicly available.
CONFIDENTIAL: "damage" or be prejudicial to national security if publicly available.
Personal information would probably be designated For Official Use Only (FOUO).
Just as I was exiting that world, they had created something called Sensitive But Unclassified (SBU).
And now there's CUI - Controlled Unclassified Information. It includes PII or sensitive company information for example.
Twitter is the home of genius,
https://twitter.com/Jim_Jordan/status/1558142035311431682
Kevin, when you dismiss the documents as "super-duper-top-secret" you are advancing a GOP talking point. Their latest spin is that the documents were misclassified and that the information contained in them isn't all that sensitive. It's rubbish and you should know better.
He really doesn't know any better.
Still, I suspect it is the SCI stuff to worry about, not the “top secret.”
Ok, look. The Folks Who Really Matter knew with crystal clarity who and what they were dealing with before orange even took office, an assessment TrumpCo reinforced with prejudice. Folks Who Matter (FWM) must, as a matter of global existential stability, play more or less by the rules, or at least the fundamental norms that allow national, and thereby international, balance and exercise of power, which means working within the constraints of our democratic and bureaucratic systems (i.e., chaos is bad for business).
So - given the necessity of working within the above constraints, FWM would never - never, not ever - let orange get anywhere near any document or information that has real value, that is, any intel or information that could be of actual use to someone as clearly deranged as orange. I mean look who he surrounded himself with - jackasses, sociopaths, and malevolents, without fail (after driving everyone else off, of course).
So - so what? Well, this - FWM set orange up. What Trump is and what he’ll do is ridiculously obvious to anyone trained in intel and counterintel, never mind just being an objective and thoughtful observer of human behavior. Sure, these docs are real, and sure, they’re sensitive. But I guarantee you they’re not fissionable. What they are is just enough to take orange (i.e., TrumpCo) down, for good.
Honestly, I think FWM understand that the game is over, that the Reagan project of permanent upward transfer of wealth and power has run its course (with almost unimaginable success), and that it’s time to move on to salvaging enough of civilization to allow continued exercise of said wealth and power. It’s been fun, folks, but now we need to get serious. America elected Las Vegas as President in 2016; like every grift the sociopathy eventually rises to the surface, and Trump’s core instability and psychosis laid bare the sociopathy and at the core of the modern conservative project, and that’s chaos, and chaos is bad for business. It’s time for him to go, and go he will.
@ConradsGhost
This is a version of "It can't happen here" with a dash of "Secret World Government." Given what's already happened here, I won't breathe easy until the body lies in state in the rotunda. Natural causes, of course.
People are saying the nuclear codes were changed to 282 characters so that Trump wouldn’t be able to tweet them to the Russians.
Soooo... Let's say, just for laughs, that all of these Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information dox actually WERE "declassified" to just plain Unclassified, suitable for release and just leaving lying around in a public place by that former guy, even there's no record of it and it's a cinch that proper procedures were NOT followed. Ditto for the mere "Top Secret", "Secret" and "Confidential" stuff.
Okay. Let's see them all published. In their entirety. Or maybe get a few more details about WHY NOT. And, just for laughs again, an arrest warrent for Individual One.
If republicans take over congress and elect trump via the House of Representatives, or if he wins outright, what do you think will happen? Our answer to that question should guide our actions with respect to trumps legal challenges.
My answer is that he will withdraw from NATO and hand Ukraine to Russia. At a minimum. He’ll sell us out to the Saudis (completely!) and give them the bomb t9 attack Iran should they do desire. Who knows what he’ll do with China. Maybe he’ll sell us out to them too. Goodbye Taiwan.
Trump knows that he will be remembered for all of history as the man who remade the world in the 2025 - 2050 time.
In all seriousness, he must be stopped here and now. If Biden and the Justice department don’t have the guts to do it, then all is lost. former CIA director Hayden knows who the enemy is. It’s trump. And he’s got to go. His wife and kids too.
But… we’re not ready to take that step. Someone might attack the FBI with a nail gun. That would be terrible! Let us appease them instead. Good idea!
Will the Resolute Desk fit into a jail cell?
Can't. Still in the oval.
I believe the most recent four presidents have had the resolute as their desk. (Last non-resolute pres was Clinton, who selected one of JFK's, of course.)
It's really a failure of imagination on the presidents's part & craftsmanship on the American people's part, that we are not making national executive caliber desks anymore.