Relating to nuclear weapons
Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation.
Experts in classified information said the unusual search underscores deep concern among government officials about the types of information they thought could be located at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and potentially in danger of falling into the wrong hands.
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Material about nuclear weapons is especially sensitive and usually restricted to a small number of government officials, experts said. Publicizing details about U.S. weapons could provide an intelligence road map to adversaries seeking to build ways of countering those systems. And other countries might view exposing their nuclear secrets as a threat, experts said.
One former Justice Department official, who in the past oversaw investigations of leaks of classified information, said the type of top-secret information described by the people familiar with the probe would probably cause authorities to try to move as quickly as possible to recover sensitive documents that could cause grave harm to U.S. security.
“If that is true, it would suggest that material residing unlawfully at Mar-a-Lago may have been classified at the highest classification level,” said David Laufman, the former chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence section, which investigates leaks of classified information. “If the FBI and the Department of Justice believed there were top secret materials still at Mar-a-Lago, that would lend itself to greater ‘hair-on-fire’ motivation to recover that material as quickly as possible.”
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Former senior intelligence officials said in interviews that during the Trump administration, highly classified intelligence about sensitive topics, including about intelligence-gathering on Iran, was routinely mishandled. One former official said the most highly classified information often ended up in the hands of personnel who didn’t appear to have a need to possess it or weren’t authorized to read it.
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Republicans around Trump initially thought the raid could help him politically, but they are now bracing for revelations that could be damaging, a person familiar with the matter said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Could be. Possibly.
H/t What a Maroon
If this were a normal country, this sort of thing would have damaged the Republican “brand” beyond repair and a new party would rise from its ashes with a renewed commitment to freedom, respect for the law, and a series of measures to reform the candidate recruitment and selection process to prevent such corrupt authoritarians from getting into the White House.
But, we live in the US and half the country turns a blind eye to the corruption of the guy who “owns the libs.”
We were pretty sure that the contents of the documents that the Archive were not discussions over the building of the Presidential Library, or Melania’s Christmas horrors. There had to be some serious concern that Trump might wave the nuclear secrets around when Erdogan or Lukashenko, or Orban, dropped by for some ice cream. He just loves to sbow off how much power he had, doesn’t he?
And I imagine they would be content with one scoop if they walked away with nuclear secrets.
Questions that may never be answered include:
-Was he planning to sell these documents?
-Has he already done so?
Hi Jared!
How secure is Mar-a-Lago? Why buy them if you can waltz in and copy them for free? That would avoid messy paper trails of money and communications. And if you could do this without anyone knowing you’ve done it, it takes a lot longer to discover exactly what has been compromised. I would deem anything that was found there to be blown unless proven otherwise.
What are the chances that Putin had contacts within Trump’s staff? What are the chances he still does? Are they all cleared by the Secret Service? People willing to work for Trump are suspect to start with; none are to be trusted. Being paid by Putin (as well as Trump) would be incentive to put up with the latter’s bullshit. It would be dead easy to fool someone as overconfident and cocky as Trump.
Doesn’t Trump owe the Saudis a lot of moolah?
Aren’t the Saudis concerned about Israel’s nuclear weapons and Iran’s rush to make them?
Is this an attempt to clear Trump’s debt to the Saudis?
Or am I joining dots that don’t exist?
It seems anything’s possible.