Thursday, June 26, 2025

The Biggest Snake of Them All


So now you tell us, Scott!

In May, 2017 The New York Times reported

The classified intelligence that President Trump disclosed in a meeting last week with Russian officials at the White House was provided by Israel, according to a current and a former American official familiar with how the United States obtained the information. The revelation adds a potential diplomatic complication to an episode that has renewed questions about how the White House handles sensitive intelligence.

Israel is one of the United States’ most important allies and runs one of the most active espionage networks in the Middle East. Mr. Trump’s boasting about some of Israel’s most sensitive information to the Russians could damage the relationship between the two countries and raises the possibility that the information could be passed to Iran, Russia’s close ally and Israel’s main threat in the region.

This wasn't the most dangerous intelligence breach of the first Trump Administration- no, not by a long shot, because Donald Trump

improperly stored in his Florida estate sensitive documents on nuclear capabilities, repeatedly enlisted aides and lawyers to help him hide records demanded by investigators and cavalierly showed off a Pentagon “plan of attack” and classified map, according to a sweeping felony indictment that paints a damning portrait of the former president’s treatment of national security information.

The conduct alleged in the historic indictment — the first federal case against a former president — cuts to the heart of any president’s responsibility to safeguard the government’s most valuable secrets. Prosecutors say the documents he stowed, refused to return and in some cases showed to visitors risked jeopardizing not only relations with foreign nations but also the safety of troops and confidential sources….

The 49-page indictment centers on hundreds of classified documents that Trump took with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago upon leaving office in January 2021. Even as “tens of thousands of members and guests” visited Mar-a-Lago between the end of Trump’s presidency and August 2022, when the FBI obtained a search warrant, documents were recklessly stored in spaces including a “ballroom, a bathroom and shower, and office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.”

The indictment claims that, for a two-month period between January and March 15, 2021, some of Trump’s boxes were stored in one of Mar-a-Lago’s gilded ballrooms. A picture included in the indictment shows boxes stacked in rows on the ballroom’s stage.

This was not done innocently or merely carelessly. Instead

Prosecutors allege that Trump, who claimed without evidence that he had declassified all the documents before leaving office, understood his duty to care for classified information but shirked it anyway. It details a July 2021 meeting in Bedminster in which he boasted about having held onto a classified document prepared by the military about a potential attack on another country.

“Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this,” the indictment quotes him as saying, citing an audio recording. He also said he could have declassified the document but “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret,” according to the indictment.

Trump even engaged others in his schemes, all the more to make them vulnerable to his blackmail. Therefore

Using Trump’s own words and actions, as recounted to prosecutors by lawyers, aides and other witnesses, the indictment alleges both a refusal to return the documents despite more than a year’s worth of government demands but also steps that he encouraged others around him to take to conceal the records.

For instance, prosecutors say, after the Justice Department issued a subpoena for the records in May 2022, Trump asked his own lawyers if he could defy the request and said words to the effect of, “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes.”

“Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” one of his lawyers described him as saying.

This was a man actively involved in concealing his guilt, of which he was well aware. So

 ...before his own lawyer searched the property for classified records, the indictment says, Trump directed aides to remove from the Mar-a-Lago storage room boxes of documents so that they would not be found during the search and therefore handed over to the government.

Weeks later, when Justice Department officials arrived at Mar-a-Lago to collect the records, they were handed a folder with only 38 documents and an untrue letter attesting that all documents responsive to the subpoena had been turned over. That day, even as Trump assured investigators that he was “an open book,” aides loaded several of Trump’s boxes onto a plane bound for Bedminster, the indictment alleges.

But suspecting that many more remained inside, the FBI obtained a search warrant and returned in August to recover more than 100 additional documents. The Justice Department says Trump held onto more than 300 classified documents, including some at the top secret level.

Last year, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the case against Trump and his two co-defendants but 

The government was challenging the Trump-appointed judge’s dismissal on appeal when he won the election, which led the DOJ to withdraw the appeal as to Trump, due to federal policy against prosecuting sitting presidents. Once Trump took office, it seemed like he would either pardon his former co-defendants or move to dismiss the appeal against them, and the Justice Department did the latter.

Cannon herself was grossly prejudicial toward Trump, though it no longer mattered once Trump was elected in November, 2024. The Supreme Court (in Trump v. United States) already had ruled that a sitting President is above the law and continuation of the case against the newly-elected President may have revealed that he had transferred classified documents to foreign countries. And We the People must not be aware that our President is an extreme national security risk.

As the late, great French novelist Albert Camus once wrote, "decent folks must be allowed to sleep easy o'nights, mustn't they?" It would be, he added, "shockingly bad taste to linger on such details, that's common knowledge." And we won't have to linger on the truth and other details, even though

.... the dismissal removes the rationale cited by the DOJ under then-Attorney General Merrick Garland for keeping special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents report volume under wraps. That is, Joe Biden’s attorney general agreed not to release that volume so long as the case was technically still pending against Nauta and De Oliveira.

The report is now in the hands of the Justice Department, headed by Pam Bondi, who obviously will not release the report because it would seriously implicate the man who appointed her and expects total obedience, Donald Trump. (Similarly, she has not released most of the Epstein files, though Trump's name can be redacted the many times it undoubtedly appears in them.)

No one knows for sure what Donald Trump has done with the documents he stole (and it looks like we never will). However, he did not steal them to line the bottom of a bird cage, nor to use them as emergency toilet paper, nor to invite prosecution for a felony simply so that he could brag about what he did. He took them for a purpose, whether or not the purpose has been accomplished. So Scott Jennings should spare us the invective about "freezing out these snakes"  when in the world of snakes, Donald Trump is the top taipan.



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