Well, here we go again. A few months ago I had to explain why Clinton's e-mails weren't equivalent to what Trump did with classified documents, now I have to do Biden. And, to be clear, the reason I have to do this again is because Republicans fundamentally refuse to understand what it was that was bad about what Trump did.
This isn't a hypothetical either; it's only been a day since we found out about Biden's classified documents and ALREADY Republicans as diverse as former-VP Mike Pence, Rep. James Comer (R-KY), and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) have gone on record making this abysmally poor comparison.
So here's the thing. This week it was revealed that some classified documents were discovered at the Biden Center at Penn University. Biden's staff immediately alerted the FBI, the National Archives, and the Justice Department and, so far, both the Biden Center and White House staff as well as the President himself seem to have fully cooperated with the investigation.
And, because conservatives will try to spin this the other way, I should be very clear: THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO DO!
It does happen from time to time that classified documents may be misplaced. This isn't great, but it does happen. When it happens, the person or people who discover this as well as the people responsible are supposed to immediately do what they can to let the government know and help them determine the scope of any potential breach. Again, as far as we can tell, it looks like Biden and his team are doing this.
And, again, because conservatives will try to spin this the other way, I should also be very clear: THIS IS THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT TRUMP DID!
Trump, as far as we can tell, (1) deliberately took hundreds of classified documents (not just a few), (2) did not disclose this to the government, (3) deliberately misled the government when asked about it, (4) hid them when the government came to look for them, and (5) has continued to obstruct the ongoing investigation into how the documents were mishandled and the scope of the potential breach.
This, not politics, is why Trump is under criminal investigation for mishandling of classified documents and, so far, Biden is not. Anyone who cannot or will not understand that is playing politics with national security and we should question whether they, themselves, should be trusted.
Here's a good article on the subject if you care to read more about it.
so when ur being investigated by the fbi over matters of national security, it’s “prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System and an attack by Radical Left Democrats,”
but when breonna taylor was murdered in her own home during a search by law enforcement, you “didn’t know enough about the situation” to make a statement
The news of the last week regarding former President Trump's possession of classified and sensitive national security documents really struck home for me, as I'm sure you've noticed from all I've been posting about it, and I thought I'd write up a bit of context for everyone as to why that is.
As some of you may know, I worked for the first three years of my career as a defense contractor developing documents and doing training for operations and maintenance on an army radar system at one of the largest defense companies in the country. In that capacity I never held a security clearance, but I did work with documents that were considered sensitive for national security.
While I was there, the video of a 2007 helicopter strike in Iraq that had killed several civilians including two Reuters journalists was leaked through Wikileaks. It was a major event for us and a good deal of changes were made to tighten up control of sensitive and classified information in the company including a good deal of additional training in properly handling such information.
(I should briefly mention my personal opinion which is that, though I agree with the things that certain leakers like Mr. Snowden and Ms. Manning leaked, the government's response is also correct legally. In my opinion, what they did was morally correct and legally incorrect, which is exactly the situation for a presidential pardon if we could ever get a President with the courage to do so.)
That's how I can tell you with absolute certainty that, had I chosen to take any of the information I worked with there home with me, I would probably have been arrested and served many years in jail and rightly so. I was very aware of this the entire time I worked there as was everyone else I worked with and we were very careful to ensure that we did not do anything that would have risked revealing the information we worked with. We would travel for work quite often, and when we did we would be given fresh laptops with only the minimum required stuff installed on it. They would then be encrypted and we would be given the access codes which we were only to use when in a secure environment such as an army base.
I also recall that we had a contractor come by for a site visit. He stayed for about a week and had not been fully cleared even for sensitive information, so our information security was extremely strict during that time. If he entered a room or cubicle, we had to immediately power off any screens so that he couldn't see any information. While he was on site, one of our employees was assigned to shadow him, basically be attached at the hip. If the guy went somewhere, our guy went with him, if he went to the bathroom, our guy went too.
So I'm not sure exactly how clear it is from the outside, but the government really does not mess around with national security documents. And from the outside I'm sure all of that sounds crazy, but you have to understand the kind of information we're dealing with. The radar system I worked on was capable of tracking and plotting the trajectory of artillery shells (this information is public, don't worry that I'm giving away things here, I wouldn't do that). To the best of my knowledge, no other country has such a system and it's definitely something we don't want Russia or China getting a hold of.
As you can see, when I heard that former President Trump had not only had possession of documents with the top classification in the United States government but had, for some reason, kept those stored in a poolside supply room without so much as a lock on the door for well over a year… well… yeah… my eyebrows literally raised when I heard that.
There's been a bunch of excuses offered for why he did it and why it's okay that he did it, but they're so far from covering all the bases that it's truly shocking. I mean, even if he had somehow declassified the documents while he was still in office (though there's no record that he did) it wouldn't matter. These are clearly marked documents and, even if the markings had been updated, they contain sensitive national security information.
As President, sure, he absolutely had the authority to do whatever he wanted with them, but he hasn't been President for over a year and a half now. President Biden hasn't even seen fit to extend him a security clearance as former President, so his ability to view and possess such information is literally the same as yours and mine. If a private citizen has marked classified documents (regardless of whether they were declassified, a document must be treated as classified until the markings are updated) and especially if they store them in an insecure location, there are severe penalties for that, usually involving multiple years in jail per document.
I watched it happen with Sandy Berger, again with Chelsea Manning, again with Edward Snowden, and again with Reality Winner, just to name a few. The government does not mess around when it comes to national security and there's far less ambiguity with regard to the handling of sensitive and classified information than there is with most of the other crimes that former President Trump is suspected of.
That's why my eyebrows raised when I heard about this. It may seem like a small thing if you've never worked in the national security field, but this is easily the most dangerous legal issue that Mr. Trump faces and, if they're at the point of publicly searching his personal residence, the investigation is pretty far along.
Hope you enjoyed this or at least found it interesting.
All right, it's been a wild week of news with lots of it coming rapidly like a firehose, so it's probably time for a LONG RANT (TM) to get my thoughts in order about it.
INTRODUCTION
So on Monday the FBI executed a search warrant at Trump's home at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and on Friday the court ordered the search warrant, two related attachments, and the property receipt unsealed at the request of the Justice Department. Between those two things a wild and crazy week unfolded.
THE SEARCH ITSELF
As best I can tell the search itself was deliberately low-key. They picked a day when both the club was closed and Trump was out of town and they went in quietly without even wearing their signature FBI jackets to identify themselves to anyone who might be watching. It wasn't until the late afternoon that a local Florida politics reporter caught wind of what was happening and the search itself was pretty much already over by the time Trump himself announced it in a social media post denouncing it.
Now that the warrant itself has come out we know in a general sense what they took, but I'll address that a bit later.
UNPRECEDENTED
This is definitely completely unprecedented. The FBI has never executed a search warrant on the home of a former President before. Then again, no President ever took classified documents with him when he left the White House before. So yeah...
THE POLITICS
This is Trump, so of course it instantly became political. Well, more honestly, he made it political. Republican reactions largely fell into two camps; the first was immediately enraged and called for investigating and even defunding the FBI while the second, also angry, simply demanded that more information be released.
Democrats, meanwhile, largely stayed on the sidelines, mostly just making statements about the equal application of the law. The Justice Department pretty much stayed silent until Thursday when FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland made statements decrying threats of violence against law enforcement and Mr. Garland announced that the Department of Justice had requested that the court unseal the search warrant.
WHAT WAS FOUND
At first we had no idea what they were even searching for. For the first several days there was a ton of guessing as to what it might have been. We knew that Trump had returned 15 boxes of material to the National Archives in February and it quickly came out that there was a suspicion that there was more. By Tuesday or Wednesday we heard that the FBI had visited Mar-a-Lago to check into these suspicions and had even sent a subpoena for more documents back in June.
On Thursday night came the bombshell, the Washington Post reported that some of the documents were nuclear documents, some of the most closely held classified information in the United States government. Then the search warrant and property receipt were unsealed on Friday afternoon. While they are fairly vague, we did learn two things: the investigation involves the Espionage Act, meaning that it is far more serious than anyone assumed, and that what was taken includes at least 11 sets of documents of various levels of classification, including one of the highest level of classification.
THE EXCUSES
As the week has gone on, Republican officials and conservative media have shifted their reasons for why it's no big deal that Trump had whatever he may have had. The line at the beginning of the week was that presidential records didn't justify a hostile search warrant. As it became clear that classified information was involved that line shifted to some form of "as long as it's not nuclear information, who cares?" Then, of course, it came out that it might involve nuclear information.
As of today the line seems to have shifted to "he was President, he can declassify anything" which, while true, has some issues. First of all, there's no evidence that he did declassify them when he was President and he's not President anymore, so he can't do it now. Secondly, the documents do not appear to have been marked as declassified. Even if something has been declassified it is still considered classified under the law until it has been properly marked as such.
MY OWN THOUGHTS
Through the week, well, as I said, it's been wild. At first this seemed like just another legal issue for Trump. When it came out that they had broken into his personal safe I was curious if they'd found something that might relate to some of his other legal problems. Then, when it came out that nuclear secrets might be involved... well, that was the "holy crap" moment.
For those who don't know, I've worked in the defense industry for most of my career so far. I've never held a clearance, but I still get trained on handling classified and sensitive information and I'm around people with clearances. I'm well aware of the penalties involved and I know that the US government does not mess around when it comes to classified information, nor do the courts.
Trump's previous legal issues were the kind that could be litigated to oblivion and the kind that would take a herculean effort on the part of prosecutors to wrestle through the legal system. It's been a year and a half since his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and prosecutors are just starting to crack his inner circle in their investigations and the New York legal issues over his property valuations have been going on for years and are only now looking like we're starting to reach the end of the first leg of the trials.
Mishandling classified information isn't like that. These cases are really open and shut and they hit hard because the law is structured in such a way that guilt is easy to prove. If a person mishandles classified information, and especially if they give it away or sell it, there's not really much you can do to raise doubt because the requirements for handling are so strict and so consistently enforced. If you did the thing, it's pretty obvious that you did the thing.
And that's why my eyes went a little wide when I heard that there were nuclear documents involved. This may be the most dangerous of any of the legal trouble that former President Trump is in and it's the kind of legal trouble that will hit him sooner rather than later.
RISIBLE ARGUMENTS
Okay, before I go, I have to share the most ridiculous argument I've heard so far attempting to justify why Trump has nuclear documents. There are some pretty bad takes out there, but this is the one that, to me, crosses the furthest from what laws actually say and into some kind of delusional crazy land where the President commands the world telepathically:
“If any president decides to declassify a document and doesn’t tell anybody — but he has made the decision to declassify something — then the document is declassified.”
Crazy, right!?! "Just think it and it happens, use the force!" :P
CONCLUSION
So yeah, that's just all in the last week. I'm sure more will come out, though I'm equally sure that we'll never know exactly what the contents of the Top Secret documents were unless Trump decides to completely screw himself.
This weekend will probably be a quiet period, but I expect everything to pick up again at full volume again next week. The journalists are probably turning over every stone and I'm sure there's at least a month of new revelations ahead of us.
In the meantime, I hope I've wrapped up the last week reasonably well. Let me know if you think I got something wrong or if I missed anything!
So I wanted to touch briefly on one aspect of the Mar a Lago raid that some people might not fully appreciate: the reason they took the security tapes.
Before I begin, I should note that I don't have a security clearance myself but I work in a clearance heavy industry (defense) so I'm fairly aware of how the security system works.
So one thing most people likely don't know about classified information, particularly highly classified information, is that it includes something known as "the chain of custody". Essentially, every classified document comes with a record of who had it, where, and when back to the moment it was created or at least marked as classified.
As far as I can tell there are two main reasons for this. The first is that if the information ever gets leaked they can go back through the list and more easily find out who leaked it and the second is that, if the document is ever altered without proper recording (yes, there's an "edit list" as well), they can track that down too. If this chain of custody is ever broken then classified information could either be stolen or altered without any way to track it (at least, no easy way).
When Trump took the documents from the White House (a secure facility) to Mar a Lago (an insecure facility) he broke the chain of custody. And it's really hard to overstate how insecure Mar a Lago is, the room the documents were stored in literally didn't even have a lock until the FBI insisted after their visit in June.
So that's where the security tapes come in. If they can verify that the documents came straight there from the White House and that they never left the field of view of a Mar a Lago security camera until the raid then they can reestablish the chain of custody for those documents.
And that's why they (probably) took the security tapes.
