All which wicked designs, wars, and evil practices of him, the said Charles Stuart, have been, and are carried on for the advancement and upholding of a personal interest of will, power, and pretended prerogative to himself and his family, against the public interest, common right, liberty, justice, and peace of the people of this nation, by and from whom he was entrusted as aforesaid.
-- "The Charge Against the King," published 1648
One of the thoughts that's come to me this week as we look at the growing evidence that Donald Trump, former President of the United States, betrayed his oath of office - by taking executive papers that did not belong to him, and treating the classified documents he took with him in such brazen ways at his private resort where such secrets were exposed - is that we've never had someone with such high rank abuse the powers of the Presidency in so gross a manner.
None of the other Presidents were this horrifying in their cluelessness, their ignorance of federal laws, their disdain for the Constitutional limits of the office needed to ensure our government worked for the people it served. In our modern era, for all that Democrats could rail about the likes of Richard Nixon (who was caught abusing power), Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and George W. Bush, none of them could be accused of being national security risks on the scale trump is behaving. For all that Republicans could rail about the likes of John F Kennedy, Lyndon B Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, none of them ever came close to getting investigated for violating our national security on the scale trump already is (and in Clinton and Obama's cases, the GOP really tried to dig through the dirt).
Because that's what we're all seeing today from the court-ordered release of the affidavit that led to the FBI search warrant at Mar-A-Lago earlier this month (which Betty Cracker at Balloon Juice labeled today as Happy Redacted Affidavit Day). All frivolity and schadenfreude aside, the affidavit even in its redacted form revealed a lot of incredible (and horrifying) details, some of which Emptywheel went into detail at her site:
The affidavit spends three paragraphs describing how, after NARA made a referral on February 9, 2022, the FBI opened an investigation to learn:
- How classified documents were removed from the White House
- Whether the storage facilities at Mar-a-Lago were suitable for storing classified materials
- Whether there were anymore classified documents at Mar-a-Lago or elsewhere
- Who had removed and retained the documents in unauthorized spaces
In a probable cause paragraph, it explains that there were 15 boxes with classified information at Mar-a-Lago and there was probable cause to believe there were more.
There’s a redacted paragraph that may describe the basis for suspecting obstruction. A later sentence in the probable cause paragraph describes that there likely will be evidence of obstruction at MAL.
The affidavit explains that this is an investigation into (among other things) 18 USC 793e — which I was among the first people to predict. This means that DOJ maintains that Trump was not authorized to have these documents...
One of Trump's consistent defenses he throws out there on social media and through his lawyers is how his status as President - even as a former President - means he can keep "his" documents and to hell what the Presidential Records Act says. What the Justice Department is setting out in the affidavit is that NO, when it comes to classified documents even former Presidents do not have that authority (and arguably that they shouldn't be abusing that authority when they are sitting in the Oval Office). Just what sort of documents did the FBI find trump was hoarding? As Emptywheel noted:
It does have paragraphs defining:
- 18 USC 793(e), the Espionage Act
- EO 13526, the Executive Order governing classified information
- Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret classifications
- Secure Compartmented Information
- Special Intelligence, which is SIGINT
- HCS, which refers to clandestine human spying
- FISA
- NOFORN, material not permissible to share with foreign governments
- Originator Controlled, meaning whoever created controls it
- Need to know
- 32 CFR Parts 2001 and 2003 which describes the Storage requirements for classified information
- 18 USC 1519, obstruction
- 18 USC 2071, willfully removing information
- 44 USC 2201, the Presidential Records Act
- 44 USC 3301(a), the Federal Records Act
The stuff I highlighted in bold are the ones most troubling regarding national security matters. HCS is also known as "Clandestine Human Intel": Ever see the first Mission Impossible movie? That's the NOC List we're talking about.
Ever hear of a fellow named Richard Welch? He worked as a CIA operative, specifically in Greece, at the height of the Cold War. In 1975, a former CIA agent published a book naming names, Welch among them, and a month after the book came out Welch was assassinated by Greek insurgents. Leaking the names of operatives can get them killed. NOC (Non-Official Cover) agents are those deep in high-risk operations, where getting exposed would compromise them at best and at most get them killed. For Trump to have such lists in his possession is a serious breach of security.
Trump also had FISA and NOFORN documents. FISA relates to NSA search warrants to track overseas communications: Those docs could expose to any foreign power who among their officials and citizens might be under U.S. surveillance. NOFORN are documents our government doesn't want foreign government - even our allies - seeing as it might compromise our dealings among them. It's literally in the description: NOT PERMISSIBLE TO SHARE. Given the number of foreign "friends" and business allies Trump has, what are the odds any of them got a chance to see NOFORN documents?
Half of these documents are not even supposed to leave certain rooms of certain buildings, that's how sensitive that information can get. How the hell did Trump and his lackeys get their hands on them and take those docs to Mar-A-Lago in the first place...?
And if you'll note the part that says 32 CFR pt. 2001 and 2003 describing storage requirements for classified information, the FBI was mortified that not only did Trump have all these classified documents at his luxury resort Mar-A-Lago, he didn't store them properly at all. The warrant search revealed trump had documents intermixed with others, kept in different rooms across the place, even in trump's bedroom and closets. Anybody could have seen any of it. And given the lapses in security at Mar-A-Lago - not just the Chinese showing up during trump's Presidency but a Russian-born immigrant with fake IDs in the last few days! - there's even the likelihood documents got walked off by people who had no legal authority to even look at them.
If Trump was so eager to keep all of "his" documents, he showed almost no care in treating them with any concern for our nation's safety.
Which leads to the Big Question, as asked by Digby over at her blog:
What was he doing with those documents?
It appears that some of the information they retrieved was extremely sensitive. He kept Human, Signals, and FISA intelligence in an unsecure location for over a year, some of it in a container at the bottom of his closet. WTF????
One of the latest excuses is that he was writing his “memoirs” or preparing for his presidential library. There is zero evidence that he is “writing” anything (he always employed a ghost writer anyway) and there are no plans for a presidential library. It seems obvious that he had some kind of ulterior motive and I’m no longer convinced that it had to do with him wanting to show off his presidential memorabilia to his sycophants. I think he either thought he could cover up his own deeds by taking the documents or that he was preparing to rain down vengeance on his enemies and reward his friends. That’s how he operates...
As Digby notes, there are multiple reasons Trump took these documents. One is how a number of documents could expose his own criminal misdeeds before he took office and then during his tenure. The DOJ does accuse Trump of obstructing ongoing federal investigations (the 1519 claim), which could cover anything from his involvement in the January 6th Insurrection to anything related to his ties to Russia or other foreign agents. The other reason has to be Trump's desire to profit from his access: he is massively in debt and indebted to other nations who propped up his overseas businesses and his flailing administration.
Remember this always: Trump does what he does to benefit himself, no one else. If he has to expose our nation's biggest military and foreign policy secrets to enrich himself, Trump will do that in a heartbeat. And there's every likelihood he already has.
This is why I can't imagine any other President sinking to the levels of betrayal that we're finding trump this evening. Even the worst Presidents we can think of - Harding, Nixon, Tyler, Buchanan, Grant, Andrew Johnson, LBJ - when it comes to corruption and misbehavior in the White House never even came close to threatening to sell out our nation's secrets in the way Trump threatens to do.
The closest examples I can even think of in our American history goes back to our days as a British colony, back to the days of Charles I, who sought to rule the United Kingdom with The Divine Right of Kings to indulge his own anger and ego, who tried to bully his way over Parliament and did so badly it led to their Civil War and to his dethronement (and execution when he kept betraying Parliament by making secret deals with Scotland, which won't be unified with England until 1707).
Trump is behaving in the same bullying manner as Charles I: demanding an Executive Privilege he no longer holds; spreading the big lie of still being President even after his Popular Vote and Electoral loss in 2020, stirring up calls for Civil War that could spill the blood of thousands of Americans; insisting that the laws of Presidential records and national security do not apply to him.
In times like this, one thinks back to what Patrick Henry said about our nation's need to free itself from the tyranny of the likes of Charles I, and how our legal system MUST step up and hold Trump to account for his acts against America's defense and well-being.
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We will see how things play out this October. Thank you all by the by for following this blog!
1 comment:
That's how bad the last Republican president is. Think of how bad the next one will be.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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