Going nuclear
In his briefing yesterday, Merrick Garland didn’t say much of substance about the raid on Mar-a-Lago. His utterances on the subject didn’t even make the front page of the Washington Post.
However, Garland’s underlings at the Department of Justice are saying plenty to their favorite reporters, and what they’re saying gave rise to the Post’s lead story today. “FBI searched for nuclear documents” is the headline in the paper edition. (Today’s Post also includes a primer on court-authorized searches that quotes Bill Otis, among other experts.)
“Nuclear documents.” What are we to make of that? The Post and its sources leave this to our imagination.
Naturally, the left’s imagination is running wild. Historian Michael Beschloss reminds his Twitter audience that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg “were convicted for giving U.S. nuclear secrets to Moscow, and were executed June 1953.” You can tell Beschloss is a historian — he gave us the month and the year.
Did Trump really take and decline to return “U.S nuclear secrets” regarding the nation’s nuclear capabilities? That seems implausible. (Trump denies having documents relating to nuclear weapons in his possession at Mar-a-Lago.)
Consider this quotation from the Post’s story:
One former Justice Department official, who in the past oversaw investigations of leaks of classified information, said the type of top-secret information described by the people familiar with the probe would probably cause authorities to try to move as quickly as possible to recover sensitive documents that could cause grave harm to U.S. security.
Yeah, “as quickly as possible.” Not a year-and-half after the documents were removed and months after negotiations over returning the documents began.
It’s possible, though, that the DOJ just obtained information giving rise to the belief that Trump might have “nuclear” documents in Mar-a-Lago. Maybe they received a tip from someone in Trump’s inner circle.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the FBI agents who conducted the search removed 11 sets of classified documents, including some designated “top secret” and meant to be available only at special government facilities. The FBI didn’t say whether any of this information has to do with nuclear weapons.
The bit about “special government facilities” is intriguing — another invitation to let our imagination run wild. But the more prudent course is to wait and see what the FBI is actually talking about here.
However, it’s not premature to ask why Trump removed top secret documents from the White House and why, when called on this, he engaged in protracted negotiations instead of simply returning the items. Nor is it unfair to wonder whether Trump refused promptly to return the documents because some of them contained sensitive information such that it would be damaging to him — legally, politically, or both — for the nature of the documents to be revealed.
The conventional wisdom about the political fallout of the Mar-a-Lago raid is that it helps Trump among Republicans because it energizes the pro-Trump faction of the party (as if this faction needs to be energized) and generates sympathy for him among those who might be drifting away from the former president. This view may be correct.
On the other hand, the present controversy highlights Trump’s endless capacity to generate needless quarrels. To be sure, the mainstream media lives to find and, if necessary, drum up controversies about Trump. But at the same time, Trump seems to live to create them.
At a minimum, he can’t stop doing so — whether with tweets containing “just the right amount of crazy,” through unsupported claims of a “landslide victory” in 2020, by holding a fiery mass rally in D.C. in furtherance of these claims, or by taking and declining to return boxes of documents, some of which apparently contain information considered “top secret.”
Sure, Trump’s enemies have “pounced” gleefully on these missteps. But they couldn’t have done so if Trump had behaved less recklessly and more in accordance with long-established norms. Trump opened the door.
If Trump runs for president again, as he almost certainly will, Republican voters should ask themselves whether they have had enough of this drama. We should ask ourselves whether there are alternatives to Trump who will fight the same kinds of substantive battles Trump has (and perhaps more effectively) and, yes, become the target of the mainstream media’s unfair, over-the-top attacks, but without giving the media so much to shoot at and with as much justification as is sometimes the case with Trump.
If Republicans ask these questions, the political fallout from the Mar-a-Lago raid probably will not help Trump. But again, let’s wait and see.
Trump is a distraction. The Democrats’ Emmanuel Goldstein. Do you think they’re gonna pay $80,000,000,000 to the IRS to “get Trump”? No. They are coming for you and me. He’s just standing in their way. In the interest of self-preservation you might start with that in mind. Unless you’re just hoping the alligator eats you last. First, they came for Alex Jones. Then they came for General Mike Flynn. Then they came for Trump. Who is next?
We don't know all the facts, but the DOJ raid on Mar-a-Lago is impossible to justify.
The Trump reps claim they cooperated with the proper authorities to identify and return or secure t presidential, rather than personal, papers, and had agreed to cooperate on an ongoing basis. So far, there has been no leaker claim to the contrary. So why the multi-hour, air, sea and land raid by oodles of agents instead of issuing a subpoena or just accepting the Trump invitation to identify presidential papers?
There are breathless claims of very top secret materials, and in particular nuclear secrets, that had to be secured. The conduct of DOJ doesn't support this claim. The DOJ didn't execute the search warrant until three days after it was issued, which suggests a lack of urgency. More to the point, the federal magistrate judge who issued the warrant said it could be executed at any time within two weeks after issuance. We haven't seen the DOJ affidavit, but it would seems the judge didn't see anything that required an immediate, gun-toting, break down the doors search.
If there was truly very top secrets in Mar-a-Lago, it was handled in the worse way imaginable. Under federal law, regulations or practice, this stuff could only be reviewed or handled in a secure room by people with the highest security clearance. Here, it appears that stuff was grabbed willy nilly by agents, many of whom probably didn't have the required clearance and almost certainly didn't handle the stuff in the prescribed manner. If there really was sensitive stuff on site, it would have been much better to handle it in cooperation with Trump's staff. The lack of spiriting it away is minimal, for what possible incentive would Trump have to use or misuse nuclear secrets?
And then there's the federal magistrate judge who issued the warrant. Trump reps and commentators have pointed to the fact he appears to be a partisan Democrat, but that's the least of his problems. A magistrate judge is not nominated by the president or confirmed by the Senate. He's an agent of the court. It appears the magistrate in this case issued a sweeping warrant to search the residence of a former president without consulting with a federal district judge. Just another day at the beach. Unbelievable!
As I said, we await facts, but not with baited breath. It's hard to see what facts would justify this action by a DOJ with a proven and recent record of political bias.
Jim Dueholm