I’d been wondering why Trump had all those secret documents at his Florida hideout — it made no sense. Did he have some nefarious scheme to sell government info to foreign agents? Was he going to blackmail people? I should have known, though, that it would be something so simple, since he’s a simpleton.
As president and in the months after he left office, he was known to show off correspondence that he had received from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un — which he had termed “love letters” — to guests at his club, people in his orbit have said. (It was these letters that originally sparked the dispute that eventually led to the FBI search, after officials at the National Archives and Records Administration noticed the famous correspondence was not among the presidential records they received from Trump’s White House and requested they and other missing documents be returned. After negotiations, Trump in January returned 15 boxes, including the letters, but kept dozens of other boxes of documents in Florida.)
They were petty little trophies he used to show off to the dupes who were his guests. This is the guy who put up fake magazine covers on the walls to ‘impress’ people. He is a walking illustration of Hanlon’s Razor.
Yeah, I keep coming up with nefarious motives for all that stolen property. Selling it? A get out of jail or I dump the goods card? I am an insecure bully who wants to show off? I suspect the last one is the most likely.
That doesn’t mean that he hasn’t given foreign intelligence access to the who and how of US Intel collection, but it most likely was not his goal.
All those empty folders? Probably up at Bedminster so he can show off there. Maybe Trump Tower (hmm, compensation?). Any of his other homes and offices.
Though I do like Ruben Bolling’s take on all those missing documents.
Trump didn’t where he is today by being stupid. Yes, we all have done stupid things, including Trump, but Trump is malevolent, pure evil, and if he has committed stupid acts it is a consequence of his self-centered arrogance and sociopathy.
What it actually shows off is his utter contempt for our laws, rules, regulations and the agencies that enforce them. That he’s beyond all laws, mores and rules of any civilized society.
And that national secrets that literally can get hundreds killed are just as important as his old magazines and underwear that the documents were packed with.
Not too many years ago, he’d have been branded an outlaw and hunted down without mercy. Instead, we’re going to allow him to run for the office again to ensure we become a nuclear armed version of Somalia – only with more and better armed pirates.
No, he isn’t.
Trump can be more than one thing, and he’s demonstrated malice and stupidity so frequently that I am confident that both explanations apply here, as they do in the case of, for example, January 6, 2021.
Slightly Off Topic,
Some of the articles on this site are silly and disgusting, but you should see the arachnids in this one:
https://www.sadanduseless.com/halloween-dogs/
Trump is known for hoarding information that he later uses as a weapon. I read a story from a NY Reporter who recounted the following personal history from the time when Trump was moving from semi-sane real estate guy to celebrity. He was helpful in being interviewed and she wrote him some notes thanking him for advancing her career. Years later, as a news reporter she wrote some articles that were critical of some of the things he was doing. He blew up at her and sent her and other reporters copies of every letter she had written praising him in order to claim she was hypocritical in what she said. He is also known to record phone conversations.
I suspect that the 60 classified documents from the most recent raid were not entirely about Trump propaganda, considering the elevated levels for some of those documents. Sure, he has the self-designed Time magazine covers, and he even has his own propaganda hanging in the restrooms at his beach home. But he also owes the Russian government billions of dollars, and likely has still unknown plans with the Saudis who gave the two billion dollars to Jared Kuschner, and an additional billion dollars to Steve Mnuchin.
And entering conspiracy territory here, but what about Ivana Trump’s grave site? She died shortly before the original planned date for a Trump deposition, and was buried before the rescheduled date for that deposition. And ten fit men were required to lift the casket, containing the ashes of a skinny 70 year old woman? On grounds which are owned by Trump, where the security is also paid for by Trump? Trump crimes are a lot like cockroaches, in that for each one you see, there are another 10 that you don’t, even when you see a lot of them.
@Owlmirror : Truth. You beta me to it and yes, its both malicious and stupid.
(The latter being a word I don’t like using but find it very hard to avoid here.)
We really should have seen this coming. Every time that the GOP and/or conservative news sites and/or talk radio claim that the liberals are doing something nefarious, it turns out that the GOP and their ilk were doing the same thing. Even more so. How many people has Trump said should be locked up for mishandling sensitive information? Comey, Clinton, probably others. So now, they can claim (and are claiming) that since they didn’t lock up these people that we claim committed heinous crimes with sensitive information, you can’t touch Trump.
Sort of a Pravda approach to innoculation.
I’ll third the multiple reasons. Chump is perfectly capable of having multiple motives. Some of the things, like the Kim letters, may have been pure vanity. Others could be a combination of vanity (look what I got ya’ Vlad) and graft (it’s yours for a million). Of course, his enablers will hawk the vanity angle, because while that’s a stupid sin, it’s a minor crime. Selling state secrets is another story.
And selling state secrets is clearly in the game. Some of those folders were empty. Perhaps he just mislaid them, perhaps they were out for photocopying, or perhaps they were already shipped away.
Even if they weren’t shipped away, who knows how many eyes, and scanners/cameras, have seen them? Trump probably doesn’t know the answer to that question himself. His ego is all he can see, and it leads him to pretty much everything he does and thinks. This is obvious, I know, but even if it can never be proven, I think it’s safe to assume that all of those documents are utterly compromised.
@11
Compromised is an understatement. US Intelligence has to assume that every classified document has been shared with folks whose motives are not friendly to the US. Anything less would be gross negligence. Any personnel, procedures, communication pathways etc that were in there need to be changed.
Then there is the situation with the empty folders. How to address whatever information was there so corrective measures can be taken.
He’s another issue with letting Trump handle classified information: https://crooksandliars.com/2022/08/last-year-cia-lost-record-numbers-human
Oh, the government knows what was in those folders. As soon as those were seized, agents with the right clearances (some of them even named Clarence) were contacting the responsible agency to warn them that the documents identified by titles, numbers, or code words, have been compromised.
Trump is both stupid and malicious. He’s the worst of all things.
For Trump, true or false, legal or illegal have no meaning. It’s all about “useful right now” or “not useful right now”, where “right now” is measured in microseconds. Hence his tendency to contradict himself within the same sentence.
Hanlon’s Razor exists so that “smart” people can feel better about themselves about being taken for a ride by the malevolent. A certain kind of smart person has a distinct tendency to talk themselves into trusting obvious bad actors by assuming everyone is trying to act rationally and in the best interests of all parties. When they’re inevitably burned by their own faulty assumptions, they turn around and claim “Hanlon’s Razor,” because it’s easier for them to pretend that a malicious person is simply too stupid to understand right from wrong than it is to accept that an evil asshole with no interest in the general welfare took advantage of their faulty reasoning.
Hanlon’s Razor is a smart person rationalizing away having been stupid, which pretty much guarantees that they’ll fall for the same tricks over and over again.
Guess what? People can be both stupid and evil. Evil both necessitates and creates a degree of what might be termed “stupidity,” but is better thought of as an evil person playing by different rules. Namely, rather than avoiding bad acts out of fear of negative consequences or causing harm, the evil person believes they’ll be able to outrun any negative consequences of any harm they choose to cause. Given that Donald Trump has essentially never faced significant negative consequences for any of the countless evil things he’s done in his nearly eight decades on this planet, I’m not sure that he’s the stupid one here.
Eh, I’m pretty sure Trump was hoping to exchange those documents for safe passage to some other country where he would be protected from prosecution and waited a little too long, possibly because he was surprised and gratified that the Republicans didn’t give him the boot when he lost. But he believed himself to be above the law (with very good reason!*) and he couldn’t resist showing the secret stuff off for an ego boost. The egotism may be his undoing, but I don’t think it was the motive.
*George W. Bush lied us into an illegal war which killed a million people outright and cost the country at least $2 trillion, then sat and twiddled his thumbs while his buddies crashed the economy, and didn’t even face a slap on the wrist in consequence after 8 years of a Democrat — and even a Democrat who was not tarred with association to the Iraq war like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden — in the White House. It is honestly a sign of how much Democrats are aligned with Republican interests that Trump’s abrasive personality got him to the point of prosecution where Bush is still grinning that stupid grin of his and giving public speeches for money.
(Oh, and by the way: NBC has reported that the CIA and FBI have searched the property of a rich Russian in New York with lots of nasty connections, and removed boxes of documents. Speculation is that this may be connected with the empty folders.)
There’s also this weird sense of ownership.
“It’s my country, not yours’.”
Doesn’t ownership imply responsibility for that which you own?
Marcy Wheeler (http://emptywheel.net) has been doing incredible sleuthing using the publicly available data from court filings and her close reading legal skillz to propose several very plausible hypotheses about what he was doing hoarding all those documents. It’s indispensable reading if you want to make better sense of this mess. Some of it was likely just trophy-keeping, as mentioned above, but some of the documents were likely related to the background of the Mueller investigation (“Russia, Russia, Russia!” — Trump always tips off his thinking with his tweets), in which various US intelligence assets had information regarding the Russian oligarchs and intelligence agents who met up with Trump campaign personnel and hangers-on. Trump has a long history of interactions and intersections with Russian mob money. Trump needs to be able to prove to himself and his hangers-on that the Mueller investigation was ILLEGALLY!11! predicated by the DEEP STATE, so he has been requesting information about the state of US intelligence gathering about Carter Page, among others. He gets the documents, he squirrels them away, hoping to “bolster his case” (soothe his wounded ego). Not incidentally, those documents have very marketable information which Trump would find very useful in his dealings with Russian oligarchs in the money laundering and real estate business.
One of the classified documents was very likely to relate to the nuclear non-proliferation deal with Iran, and seems very likely to contain the US’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear capabilities. That would obviously include intelligence information generated by insiders from Iran, Israeli asses, US capabilities, etc. etc. That information would be really interesting to people in Trump and Kushner’s orbit, tied in (again) to lots of shady real-estate money.
I’m sure some of it was that he didn’t want anyone to see some of the documents that tended to incriminate him (e.g. federal law enforcement or domestic intelligence about white nationalist terrorists who are uncomfortably close to the Trump campaigns or the J6 insurrection). Trump knew that all this stuff had to go to the the National Archives and that in future, anyone will be able to read it, which wounds his narcissism. So if he just bogarted the documents, the Archives wouldn’t get them and he could cover up various embarrassingly crimey stuff.
In short, I think the evidence shows that it’s a mix of things that Trump was trying to accomplish, and I think that merely ascribing all of it to stupidity or vanity is a mistake that will keep us from learning or appreciating the depths of the depravity of his mal-administration. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter his motivations. The law on the Espionage Act is very clear here that he violated that act by having all that material. And it’s clear that he obstructed the investigation to recover the documents. He’s legally guilty on these things and it is, so far, a complete slam dunk case if the DOJ chooses to indict him on those. His motivations, it will take some time to unravel, and some of it may be so damaging to the US intelligence community that it really can’t be fully disclosed to the public at large. They may not want to charge him in open court on various kinds of shenanigans he was up to.
Also, I’m delighted to learn from vucodlak@17 that there is a name for the rhetorical/logical fallacy of assuming stupidity as an explanation. We’re seeing a lot of that in the Trump Espionage Act violation scandal here. Serious people are writing that “Trump would have to be a complete idiot to have violated the law in that way, so there must be some shenanigans that the FBI is pulling. He’s not that stupid, he’d never commit crimes that obvious, so it must be a witch hunt.” Yeah, right, you keep believing that. The truth is pretty simple: he’s a malevolent narcissist and is both stupid and evil, and has been insulated for years by big piles of money and lawyers. People who were in positions to know this have been saying this about Trump for years, decades even, before he ran for Prez.
Israeli assets. Jeez.
And according to Wheeler, an interesting secret document which seems to be a different and secret pardon for Roger Stone, related to some work about information about a President of France. About which we know little, although there were some stories a couple years back. It might be some weird blackmail or compromat material about Macron. Not known.
Dr. Pablito:
Does Trump actually think that the papers that went to the Whitehouse per his request are the only copy out there? I guarantee that the originator of the classified document has at least one copy in their long-term files.
META
When I was a whitewater raft guide back in high school, there were two Jewish summer camps that brought kids twice a week to go whitewater rafting (on a class-III river (nothing big)). One of the counselors was a guy named Ari who was an ass. Huge muscles. Huge ego. Wouldn’t shut up. Bragged about his military experience as a paratrooper. Truly, an Israeli ass.
/META
Paul K @ #11 — “who knows how many eyes” Indeed. Mar-a-lago is a security sieve. Take the case of Inna Yashchyshyn, aka “Anna de Rothschild”. She got close enough to Chump at Mar-a-lago, and Sen. Lindsey, to have her picture taken with him. She presented herself as a Rothschild heir, but she’s a Russian-speaking Ukraine. Her exact purpose isn’t clear, perhaps just a charity scam and Chump is a perfectly good mark for that sort of thing. Also, she might be considered attractive to the toad, so an even easier mark.
Re The Vicar @ #18 report of a Russian oligarch’s US properties being searched and boxes being removed: Per the linked article Viktor Vekselberg is Ukraine-born, and close to Putin. Not only are his New York properties being searched, but a property connected to him in Miami.
To Dr. Pablito’s point (@ #20), Vekselberg was questioned by the Mueller investigation.
Dr. Pablito @ #20 — Are there any particular pieces by Wheeler that you can recommend? There are quite a few.
@24 robro: Yup, hard to believe that Vekselberg is not all tied up in this. I’m not saying it’s one neat package with all of Trump’s many slimy deals all linked together, but it seems quite clear that there is a nexus of Russian influence happening with this particular scandal. Not that Vekselberg would, like, keep paper documents handed to him by Trump or minions, but there may be a lot more if you shake that tree. The problem with all these Secret documents at Merde-a-Lago is that everyone has cell phones now with amazing cameras. You don’t need a xerox machine or a microfilm camera. You slip in to the pool storage closet and click, click, click and you’ve got amazing information that you’ve just handed over to the Kremlin. Or some Saudi slimeballs. Or mobsters.
@23 oggie: You know, it’s not real clear what Trump thinks about whether he has the only copy of a thing, but he does know that a very effective legal strategy is to slow everything down and make things difficult. If he doesn’t allow the Archives to get documents, they can’t turn them over to the J6 cmte, and if the J6 cmte hasn’t requested them (yet) from the agency or entity that also has them, then that slows things down, and delay, delay, delay has been Trump’s M.O. for a long time.
I also worked with an Israeli guy like that for a few years. Perfectly nice fellow as long as you didn’t get him talking about politics/conflict in the Middle East, and he was at least smart enough to realize that he could be baited into harangues. But nice fellow overall.
The justice department should just charge for his crimes. It is win-win. Those on the right get to be outraged over something real and use it for fund-raising. Those on the left get to pretend that rich and powerful people are not above the law.
Dr. Pablito @ #26
Oh I know. In fact, there’s an iPhone/iOS app called Notes that uses the camera to scan documents, rather than take photos. The result is a smaller file size and much more portable…in fact, the result is a PDF…and isn’t rocket science to extract text from a PDF. Then it’s easy to parse and search large quantities of text. I assume Android has a similar feature.
While I won’t assume until everything is counted, I was sort of right?
I wondered if it was going to be like serial killers and trophies. But I don’t recall serial killers wanting to show the trophies to anyone.
Moar trumpistas.
The Trump wannabe in Florida, deSantis, has done goofed again.
His storm troopers dragged away 20 ex-cons in their underwear, accused of illegally voting (some categories of ex-cons do not get the vote back). It turns out that under Florida law- signed by another Republican governor- you can only be charged for knowingly voting when you lack the right to vote.
The 20 got the papers from the local authorities, so they had no reason to question their right to vote.
And the local authorities depend on the central state authorities – run by deSantis- to alert them of people ineligible for voting. So when DeSantis now blames the local authorities he is knowingly lying.
In the end, the twenty will get away scot-free, no doubt followed by lawsuits against the state.
But Floridans will only hear of this by word of mouth, as the media almost certainly will ignore this display of incompetence.
The problem with Hanlon’s Razor is it assumes incompetence and malice can’t co-exist.
@12. ardipithecus & #11. Paul K : If folks haven’t seen it before Jim Wright of the Stonekettle Station blog has a really goodessay on the significance of what Trump took and what it means here :
https://www.stonekettle.com/2022/08/loose-lips-sink-ships.html
Jim Wright being someone who would really know from personal lived experience too.
chrislawson, you too?
Nope.
It’s an aphorism which can work as a heuristic, not a law of nature.
StevoR:
In your opinion. I took a look:
He does not know “the significance of what Trump took and what it means”, and thus can’t know its significance. He makes that very, very explicit.
Obs, there is no need to read any further than that confession.
@30 birgerjohansson
Yeah we Floridians are incapable of reading such things as found on Florida media sites (complete media suppression):
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article265138721.html
https://www.wfla.com/news/politics/desantis-elections-supervisors-disagree-over-who-determines-voter-eligibility/
And we cannot find it on aggregator sites like Google News for media outside Florida. Or watch the Young Turks on Youtube.
Of course I’m not most Floridians. Some will be incurious. Some will applaud Dersantis’ actions despite how bad it is looking for him. But the media is not ignoring it.
Hemidactylus @35
Oops. My bad.
I checked “Farron Balanced” at Youtube where Farron Cousins said the debunking do not reach the Republican voters, I over-interpred that.
Yeah, he had a bunch of top secret stuff back in his lair. But… umm… Isn’t he the same President Bozoface who was widely reported to have trouble reading his daily briefings when he or paying attention to them when they were read to him back when he had legit access to secret info in them?
@ 25. robro : “Dr. Pablito @ #20 — Are there any particular pieces by Wheeler that you can recommend? There are quite a few.”
Such as? His best, say, three or so in your view would be _______ ? Links or at least titles please?
@34. John Morales : Keep reading and you’ll understand what I meant..
&
We don’t need to see the specific top secret files in person ourselves to understand why what Trump did is horrendously bad and how significant it might be. We don’t anymor ethabn we need to know the nuclear codes ourselves to know that stealing and sharing them with others of dubuious repute would be a bad thing too.
StevoR, he made it damn clear he does not know anything.
Repeatedly. Strenuously.
Doesn’t stop him pontificating, of course.
Or you lapping it up.
@36 birgerjohansson
No worries. I was amused by the overinterpretation not cross. Sadly enough Florida voters may be ensconced inside an ideological filter bubble where such available information on Dersantis’ heinous actions (including during the pandemic) will not be transformed into useful knowledge and translated into sending his political career into a well deserved tailspin. That’s the frustrating part for me, but plenty of Florida media outlets have been laser focused on his shenanigans.
I have watched the demonization of school textbooks with horrid fascination. Next step; arabic numerals?
@39. John Morales : Or you totally missing the actual points he’s making.
@39. John Morales : Or you totally missing the actual points he’s making.
StevoR @ # 35 et seq – FYI, Dr. Marcy Wheeler by all indications identifies & qualifies as a “her” (as well as an exceptionally smart and hard-working journalist).
@ ^ Pierce R. Butler : Ah. Ok. Thanks. I didn’t know. Appreciated & will try to remember.
@StevoR
“Jim Wright of the Stonekettle Station blog has a really goodessay on the significance of what Trump took and what it means”
As John has pointed out, this is simply wrong. It’s an essay on the significance of SIGINT “because that’s my area of experience and expertise”. The rest is speculation about Trump that is no more informative than the comments here.
“Or you totally missing the actual points he’s making.”
Ad hominem. John didn’t comment on his points, only your characterization of the essay. Since StoneKettle repeats over and over again that he doesn’t know what Trump took, it can’t possibly be “a really goodessay on the significance of what Trump took”. You might better say that it’s a really good essay on the significance of what Trump might have taken, but that’s a personal value judgment about a speculative work.
Seriously? It’s bad enough that you’re not familiar with emptywheel, but she entered the conversation here in #20, “Marcy Wheeler (http://emptywheel.net)” … why in the world are you asking “Such as? ” in response to “Dr. Pablito @ #20 — Are there any particular pieces by Wheeler that you can recommend? There are quite a few.” when you haven’t even glanced at #20?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcy_Wheeler
I assume PZ has his tongue somewhat in his cheek; he wouldn’t take such a simplistic approach to a scientific question.
People tend to treat Trump like the blind men describing an elephant. One of the most frustrating things in 2016 was people (both on the right and the Bernie left) seeing Trump only as a bully and bigot, and not as the guy who was going to put Roe-overturning justices on the SCOTUS, enact massive wealth transfers via changes in tax laws, dismantle the regulatory state, sell off national mineral rights, attempt to end the ACA, attempt to privatize Social Security, enable Putin, etc. The notion that he stole 10,000 government documents just so he could wave around the letter from Kim Jung Un is naive at best. One of the things that he learned well from his mentor Roy Cohn is how to distract and mislead–which is all the more effective when the distraction is itself real.
Nor do we need StoneKettle to point out these obvious things. It’s not a bad essay but I’ve read many better ones, and it’s definitely not an essay on the significance of what Trump took when the author says over and over that he doesn’t know what was taken.
BTW, talk of “nuclear codes” is nonsense. Old nuclear codes are completely useless and worthless. The “nuclear stuff”, as StoneKettle says (while deferring discussion of it “to those who are experts in that area”), is about capabilities and technologies, not about “codes”.
@37 He’ll just ask his friends in the Russian embassy to explain what it all means over dinner.
@35 “Yeah we Floridians are incapable of reading such things as found on Florida media sites (complete media suppression)”
birgerjohansson didn’t say anything about “complete”, and ignoring something isn’t the same as suppressing it. If it isn’t being covered prominently on the local evening news then it is being ignored in a relevant way.
@27 “Those on the left get to pretend that rich and powerful people are not above the law.”
Oh, have you seen them doing that?
@26 “I also worked with an Israeli guy like that for a few years. Perfectly nice fellow as long as you didn’t get him talking about politics/conflict in the Middle East, and he was at least smart enough to realize that he could be baited into harangues. But nice fellow overall.”
I hear that a lot of the folks who attended lynchings and mailed postcards to their friends were nice people, bringing their families and picnic baskets.
@53- Jim Balter
Fair point. That I as a Floridian am at least somewhat aware of such things doesn’t generalize. Plus that such shenanigans are addressed by some Florida media I have found isn’t the same as it being shouted loudly from local newscasts as it should be.
@56 Thanks. Your comment “Yeah we Floridians are incapable of reading such things” seemed to take offense at an insult that birgerjohansson didn’t write.
@47. Jim Balter : Fair enough. I skimmed that comment #20 by Dr. Pablito & it didn’t register enough for me.Mea culpa.