Are they unique?
Once again the question arises: what about copies? Why isn’t the reporting explaining to us why there is so much agitation over The Documents with no mention of copies?
Anyway. Rolling Stone reports:
IN THE WEEKS after the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid, former President Donald Trump repeatedly made a simple-sounding but extraordinary ask: he wanted his lawyers to get “my documents” back from federal law enforcement.
Trump wasn’t merely referring to the alleged trove of attorney-client material that he insists was scooped up by the feds during the raid, two people familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone. The ex-president has been demanding that his team find a way to recover “all” of the official documents that Trump has long referred to as “mine” — including the highly sensitive and top secret ones.
Sources close to Trump agree with outside legal experts that such a sweeping legal maneuver would be a long-shot, at best. “I hate to break it to the [former] president, but I do not think he is going to get all [the] top-secret documents back,” says one Trump adviser. “That ship has probably sailed.”
But why is it implied that the documents are unique? Why wouldn’t Trump have multiple copies in multiple places? What are we missing? Is it that the originals have copy-proof Somethings that mean copies are essentially worthless? Or what?
Hmmm….I think you’re overthinking it.
Trump is extremely literal. This is a guy who thinks documents are “gone” if he’s torn them up and flushed the bits down the toilet. Most people understand that the significance of a document is its information content, but for Trump the object itself matters. They stole his Precious and he wants it back.
Which is not to say that there aren’t copies. I’m sure the intelligence community assumes that everything they recovered from Mar-a-Lago is compromised.
No I’m not asking why Trump is so focused on the documents, I’m asking why the FBI and DoJ and everyone else is, and why there’s no discussion (that I’ve seen) of the fact that there could be copies all over the place.
The FBI/CIA/DOJ want the documents back as a threshold matter. The documents are compromised, yes, but that doesn’t mean you abandon them. If you do, then you give Trump (and by extension, anyone) de-facto ownership of anything they choose to steal. The documents are gov’t property to be recovered; they are evidence of crimes committed; they are a starting point for assessing the damage to national security. You really do want them back.
Why the media isn’t talking about copies…obviously, Fox News isn’t going to. On the left…my sense of it is that the FBI raid is the big news. The raid is a real thing that happened. People saw the cop cars with flashing lights on TV.
Copies are abstract. Hypothetical. They aren’t breaking through. The only way copies would break through is if they became a real national security threat, but if they have or did become a real national security threat, the gov’t would want to keep it quiet, because governments are like that. I don’t see copies getting traction in the regular news cycle.
I guess that all makes sense but it seems like a very big hole in the story.
I agree that from the intelligence community’s perspective they are probably treating this as the largest security breach in US history. Anything that circus peanut had access to must be considered compromised. That’s probably one of the reasons this took more time – security services scurrying to contain the damage. Our enemies could not have imagined a better Manchurian Candidate than that sack of whale shit.
I don’t really see where speculation about copies gets us.
What’s the idea — that Trump made backup copies, and kept them stored elsewhere, so if the government raided Mar-A-Lago, he’d still have copies? The problems with that are:
1. Trump isn’t known for his foresight and planning. Also, he’s incredibly arrogant and I think he believed the government would never dare raid Mar-a-Lago. The idea that he would have a backup plan in case of an FBI raid strikes me as dubious.
2. If he did have the foresight to make copies, then why not just return the originals, so that he avoids being raided in the first place? (I should note that it’s possible this is exactly what happened — that the documents seized are actually copies of the ones he previously returned to the government. But if that’s the case, then it’s just a minor detail — he’s not really any more or less guilty of the potential charges against him, and your concern that he still has documents is moot because his copies were seized.)
Pliny – and that was true all along, wasn’t it – even before he was elected.
Screechy – I’m not saying it gets us anything – or that it gets anyone anything – I’m just befuddled about why it’s not even discussed – why all the reporting is about these documents in these boxes from this place at a time when making backup copies of things is laughably easy. I just don’t get it, that’s all.
Maybe it’s because, as noted above, any possible copying is hypothetical; the originals (if that’s what they are) are “concrete”. Any potential copies, or any access by unauthorized individuals, is conjecture. Maybe Trump wasn’t smart enough to make copies, but that doesn’t mean others who might have gained access to the documents because of Trump’s illegal possession of them, didn’t make copies for themselves and whomever they were working for.