Up next
Author
Tags

The affidavit is out and most of it is redacted, as anyone should have expected in a natsec probe. Search warrant affidavits typically aren’t made public before charges are filed but Judge Bruce Reinhart made an exception in this case due to righties’ concerns about the propriety of the investigation. Reinhart was looking to strike a balance between revealing enough of the document to show Americans that the FBI had good reason to search Mar-a-Lago but not so much that it would give away sources and methods, which might jeopardize the case. Trump will get the unredacted version if and when he’s indicted so that he can build a defense.

It won’t take you long to skim through it, but if you want an instant verdict on whether it’s helpful or harmful to him, here you go:

Good ol’ 45, always trying to turn down the political temperature.

Here’s the key paragraph, the newsiest bit in the unredacted portion. “HCS” stands for “HUMINT Control System,” jargon for clandestine intelligence assets. A foreigner who got hold of those documents conceivably could have used them to smoke out a mole in their country who was spying for the U.S.

A guide to the acronyms from Ret. Gen. Mark Hertling:

Nearly 200 classified documents in the bunch. And note well: Those 184 documents were found in the first tranche of boxes that Trump returned in January of this year, after the National Archives had spent months nagging him to pretty-please send the material back so that Congress and the DOJ wouldn’t have to get involved. More documents were returned by Trump’s lawyers in June. And then somehow the feds grew suspicious that he was still holding some back, which is what necessitated this affidavit and the subsequent search a few weeks ago.

Their suspicions were borne out. They found more classified information during the search, recovering another 11 sets of classified documents, some of which were marked “top secret/SCI,” per the inventory compiled by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago. When Trump says “WE GAVE THEM MUCH,” what he means is “we stonewalled for 15 months, returned a portion of the documents each time we were threatened with legal action, and ultimately forced the feds to come take the rest because we wouldn’t give them all back.”

If you’re wondering why he was so adamant about not returning them, tell me if this storyline sounds familiar. Someone who’s unqualified or underqualified starts giving him “advice” by telling him things he wants to hear, he begins obsessing over that advice and ignoring the actually knowledgeable experts all around him, and ends up creating a gigantic, wholly avoidable mess for himself. Here’s the latest from CNN, which has Judicial Watch chief Tom Fitton playing a role similar to that of Sidney Powell during the post-election “Kraken” period:

READ RELATED: Today's #TEMS live chat: Inflation and recession, Beto's charm, and the Trump raid

Fitton, the longtime head of the legal activist group Judicial Watch, had a simple message for Trump — it was a mistake to give the records to the Archives, and his team should never have let the Archives “strong-arm” him into returning them, according to three sources familiar with the matter…

While Trump continued to publicly tout his cooperation with the Archives, privately the former President began obsessing over Fitton’s arguments, complaining to aides about the 15 boxes that were handed over and becoming increasingly convinced that he should have full control over records that remained at Mar-a-Lago, according to people with knowledge of his behavior at the time.

Trump even asked Fitton at one point to brief his attorneys, said a person familiar with the matter.

“The moment Tom got in the boss’ ear, it was downhill from there,” said a person close to the former President, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

That’s the kind of judicious, discerning temperament we should want in charge of the free world.

Keeping the documents at Mar-a-Lago despite numerous requests to return to the feds would have been bad under any circumstances but the damage might have been mitigated had Trump insisted on storing them in a SCIF (“Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility”) for safekeeping. Another newsy bit from today’s affidavit is that … he did not. In fact, when the feds reviewed the first tranche of documents he returned, they found a jumbled mess:

If mundane items like newspaper clippings could get mixed up with sensitive documents, odds are that sensitive documents were also mixed up at Mar-a-Lago with mundane items and possibly within reach of those who lacked the clearance to see them. Another part of the affidavit claims that the FBI warned his team a few months ago that they needed to do a better job securing whatever was still on the premises, just in case:

But they didn’t do a better job. WaPo reported a few days ago that surveillance video of the storage room at Mar-a-Lago showed people coming and going. And the FBI allegedly found documents in Trump’s bedroom and office during the search, potentially placing them within eyeshot of anyone else with access to those rooms. A foreign intelligence team surely would have paid handsomely if someone on the housekeeping staff at the complex were willing to take a few surreptitious photos of interesting documents lying around in Trump’s suite.

Could that have happened? Well … yeah. Maybe:

In lieu of an exit question, go read this hair-raising story at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about “Anna de Rothschild” of the famous Rothschild family, who visited Mar-a-Lago several times over the past year and schmoozed with VIPs there. She managed to have her picture snapped with Trump and Lindsey Graham during a golf event at one point. Her real name turns out to be Inna Yashchyshyn; she’s a Russian-speaking immigrant from Ukraine. She’s also now the subject of an FBI investigation.

Source: