A new Washington Post article suggests that Trump may have shown the top secret documents in his possession to others without the necessary security clearance. Democrats in Congress are requesting that Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines immediately put together a report on possible damages to our national security posture. The request certainly doesn’t “prove” that Trump shared the documents with anyone, but it indicates a concern that the documents didn’t sit in a box gathering dust at Mar-a-Lago.
From the Washington Post, we learn that members of Congress believe that Trump may have put the country at “grave risk.”
The House Democrats’ top investigators on Saturday asked the director of National Intelligence to conduct a review and damage assessment of the boxes of highly classified information seized by the FBI this week from former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
The letter was sent to National Intelligence Director Avril Haines by House Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) and cites the search warrant cataloguing the classified documents of various levels of sensitivity found at Mar-a-Lago.
“Former President Trump’s conduct has potentially put our national security at grave risk,” the two wrote, asking also for a classified briefing on the assessment as soon as possible. “This issue demands a full review, in addition to the ongoing law enforcement inquiry.”
One would hope that the moment that the FBI learned that Trump was holding top secret, special compartmentalization documents, any American doctrine that may have been threatened was immediately changed. There are, however, many elements to our nuclear weapons program that cannot be changed, e.g. missile design specifications. Ironically, the more technical the document, the more likely that Trump kept the documents for nefarious purposes. Would Trump ever “bring a file home for work” that discusses the technology that goes into some of our weapons’ systems? (There is no available evidence as to the exact nature of the documents other than that they apply to nuclear weapons, which obviously encompasses a wide range of topics.) Would Trump ever actually work?
Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the public will have any specific knowledge regarding the documents any time soon, perhaps ever, depending upon the exact nature of the documents. There are reports that some files could not even be named because any name would give away secret contents, e.g. (as a silly example) “UFO crash sites 1990-2010”. Another security concern is the safety of the informant. The public will have to live with a lot of questions for some time.
It is highly unfortunate that it must be this way, that so much must be kept secret. The general description has allowed the MAGA faithful to waive away the entire matter as “planted” by the FBI, which – they say, is a criminal organization under Biden’s direct control.
There is so much tragic irony. Trump may well have won the 2016 election because he convinced the public that Hillary couldn’t be trusted with classified information and that she should go to jail, and yet it’s Trump who left with state secrets and was served with a criminal search warrant. Trump originally said that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose a single vote. Trump took a shot at this country by endangering our very security, perhaps altering the global nuclear posture (depending on whether others saw the documents and the subject matter), and yet he won’t lose a single vote from supporters who will say that Trump shot the gun in self-defense under attack by a criminal mob from the government.
Fortunately, the vast majority of people in the country have not been fooled and know that this matter couldn’t be more serious, which is precisely why Congress wants an immediate assessment of the damage to our national security.
