Application
There is an aspect of Trump getting caught holding classified documents that isn’t receiving much, if any, attention.
Why did Trump want all of those classified documents?
Exceptions
As I have mentioned in a previous blog post I had a Top Secret and then some security clearance when I was in the Army five decades ago. Here’s my point. The stuff that I had access to had zero application to civilian life. The information that I had only applied to the security of the military, our operations and our nation. It would have been ILLEGAL for ANYONE ANYWHERE to take classified material home with them. PERIOD.
The information was of no use to my daily life then except for my duty time and once I left the military my expertise was of no use to me at all. I was glad to be done with it. However, I was still responsible not to talk about or share what I knew. Security was/is still necessary even in civilian life
There are exceptions to what I have said.
They aren’t good ones.
The Marketplace.
A Navy nuclear engineer and his wife were recently sentenced to years in prison as a result of their plea agreement for trying to sell Top Secret information regarding nuclear submarines to a foreign government.[1] The judge rejected their plea agreement. Prosecution had recommended 12 ½ to 17 ½ years for the husband and 3 years for his wife. The judge didn’t think that harsh enough punishment. They are now scheduled to go to trial.
The preceding example demonstrates how secret information can be used to other purposes. In this instance greed was the driving force. In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg released information from a Top Secret report to the New York Times that dealt with the war in Viet Nam.[2] The papers largely proved that the war was unjustified. Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage act and faced the possibility of 115 year prison sentence. He ended up being found not guilty. A Navy sailor, Robert Hoffman II, got 30 years for trying to sell classified information for monetary gain.[3] Julian Assange,[4] Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden are all examples of people that mishandled classified information.[5] Assange is facing extradition, Manning is in jail (again) and Snowden is in Russia. Trump’s buddy is there.
All of those that I mentioned had information that they weren’t supposed to have. Greed wasn’t always the motivator. The result was always the same.
National security was compromised.
The first one
The Trump Party is making a big deal of Trump being the first President that has ever had the FBI serve a search warrant to retrieve documents including highly classified documents from his home. This is true. Trump had several other firsts as President. He was the first President to not accept the results of an honest election. He was the first President to not have a peaceful transfer of power. Trump was the first President to be laughed at by the United Nations General Assembly for making stupid remarks. He was the first President to tell over 20,000 lies in office. He was the first President to lose 400,000 people due to mishandling a pandemic. The first President to be in not one but 2 soft porn films. The first to have a wife that had posed for nude photo shoots. His firsts go on and on, but you get the picture. He’s a man with a flexible moral operating system.
He’s the first President to steal classified information.
Trump mishandled classified information from the very beginning of his tenure and throughout his administration as I have noted before. Again, there are some ‘why’ questions hanging in the air. Why did Trump did Trump take home classified documents? What did Trump want to do with them?
Why?
Compromised
I don’t know what information Trump had that was classified Top Secret and don’t really need to know to have a good idea of what is taking place right now. The classified information that was in the hands of someone and not in a secure location (a closet with a padlock is NOT a secure location) has to be assumed to be compromised. The documents were transferred by unsecured means. People other than Trump knew of the documents’ existence and handled them. How many? How much did they see? Who did they tell? Were copies made?
Guaranteed there is an ongoing investigation now by agencies other than the FBI. Potential damage assessment is taking place right now regarding the information that might have been compromised. Agencies will have to start with the assumption that the material was compromised. PERIOD.
Will national policies have to be changed? Will any of our allies have to be notified or involved? (Trump burned Israel early in his administration by divulging classified information that they had obtained to the Russians.[6]) People other than the former President who were around those documents are being investigated right now. The actual costs, depending on what may have been compromised, could end up being astronomical. Yes, we’ve never had a President do something like this before.
Why?
Defense! Defense! Defense!
It’s kind of hard to tell what defense Trump’s lawyers will mount. Trumpers have thrown so many out there. One of the more outrageous defenses has been put forth by Trump. He maintains that he had declassified the information. We now know that he didn’t because of a letter that Trump received from NARA (National Archives) and for some bizarre reason released.[7] So, in one fell swoop he admitted that he had it and that he knew what it was because it had passed through his hands and he kept it. It has been widely disproved by those who worked for him that it wasn’t in fact declassified, but for argument’s sake let’s assume that Trump did declassify the documents.
What would that mean?
Secret meeting?
Well, it would mean that previously classified, highly sensitive material would be in the public domain. Otherwise, it would be just kind of declassified and therefore still illegal for him to have in his possession. Why in the world would any patriotic American want to make that kind of information public? Trump is no Daniel Ellsberg. He’s no Snowden either but could still end up in Russia. Remember when it was in the news that Trump met in secret with Putin several times?[8] No witnesses. Here’s what we do know,
Trump had 300 classified documents.
We can only hope that his Secret Service detail is keeping him under their watchful eye should Trump try and leave the country. My assumption here is that they also swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and that they take
Our nation’s security seriously.
Circle the wagons
There is no good reason for Trump to do what he did. He even made one of the laws that he might have violated for doing what he did punishable as a felony. If charged he will be considered innocent until proved guilty. Will he plead the 5th Amendment again?
At this point it is almost a sure thing that others will be charged with violating the law or laws. I read a comment today about MAGA means Make Attorneys Get Attorneys. People will be going down over this. I am kind of jaded though. The rich and powerful in this country tend to get away with their law breaking.
Instead of thinking up excuses for their glorious leader, the Trump Party might consider putting America first. They certainly talk about that a lot. Then do it. Trump broke the law. NO person in this country is supposed to be above the law. He also swore an oath to the nation. He violated that oath.
Bigly.
[1] https://www.stripes.com/branches/navy/2022-08-16/nuclear-espionage-case-navy-engineer-7006739.html
[2] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Daniel-Ellsberg
[3] https://www.courthousenews.com/secret-spilling-ex-navysailor-gets-30-years/
[4] https://www.npr.org/2019/04/12/712659290/how-much-did-wikileaks-damage-u-s-national-security
[5] https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/DC-Decoder/2013/0618/In-the-end-NSA-might-not-need-to-snoop-so-secretly
[6] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/17/15653434/israel-spy-compromised-trump-russians
[7] https://lawandcrime.com/trump/national-archives-letter-says-trumps-lawyers-tried-to-delay-fbi-involvement-in-recovery-of-documents-at-the-highest-levels-of-classification-from-mar-a-lago/
[8] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/15/us/politics/trump-putin-meetings.html