Politics - News Analysis

Ex-FBI Asst Director Says Grand Jury Probe into Mar-a-Lago Top Secret Files Poses Most Serious, Immediate Threat to Trump

Frank Figliuzzi is familiar to those who watch Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC (as everyone should, it is the smartest early evening show on cable). Figliuzzi is a former Assistant Director of the FBI and headed up the counter-intelligence division or, more bluntly, the man in charge of every espionage case within the federal government.

So when he writes an article for MSNBC.com, which argues that the grand jury that has been convened regarding Trump’s possession of classified files – some marked top-secret – is more significant than the public seems to appreciate and also poses the single biggest immediate threat to Trump, it behooves all of us to pay attention.

In short, Figliuzzi says that the FBI would not convene a grand jury unless they could beat every possible Trump defense and that the FBI wouldn’t be going after this crime if it wasn’t significant. Figliuzzi believes it could be one of the most significant crimes, selling some of the government’s top secrets.

People wait for a moving van after boxes were moved out of the Eisenhower Executive Office building inside the White House complex, on Jan. 14, 2021, in Washington.

Figliuzzi focuses upon a single sentence in the original New York Times article to make the case that it is unlikely a situation where Trump can say that the boxes were mishandled by a staffer or a complete accident. No, these files have always seemed to be very close to Trump, almost weirdly, impossible to ignore, like a truly personal possession:

A sentence in The New York Times story may shed some light on what the Justice Department may have: “The documents in question are believed to have been kept in the residence of the White House of classified documents sitting in the residential wing of the White House doesn’t sound like a mistake to me. That sounds deliberate and less like an error that could be attributed to staff. Virtually every day during my 25 years with the FBI, I handled classified information. It was my experience that staffers, whose job is to know and comply with the rules and regulations for handling such data, don’t deliberately break those rules unless someone at a high level makes them break those rules. That’s why I don’t believe this grand jury is targeting low-level staffers.

Trump kept these files in the residence of the White House. AGAIN, in the residence of the White House. That sounds like something someone might do with their medical records or something else he believes to be his own personal possession. Or something he planned on stealing. And then they went to Mar-a-Lago? And some were marked top secret?

Frank Figliuzzi is former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI and a regular on MSNBC.

One doesn’t have to be a special agent to make the next leap but we have a top former special agent to make the next leap for us:

 As Justice Department investigators examine the documents, they’ll be able to see whether the contents held some value to Trump or those around him and possibly determine whether Trump could benefit from whatever’s in those documents. We mustn’t forget that during Trump’s term, his family members parlayed their relationship with him into personal profit and that while he was president, Trump’s own businesses reportedly raked in $2.4 billion.

A president selling secrets? A direct betrayal of the United States? For purely personal gain? And probably to make Putin or MBS happy? That does not sound beyond Trump. It sounds like quintessential Trump. But we’ve become so numb to hearing “grand juries empaneled” regarding Trump and nothing coming of it… Figliuzzi says this one may not be like the others.

It is best to listen to people like him. We will watch it very closely.

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[email protected], @JasonMiciak, with Nicole Hickman

meet the author

Jason Miciak is a political writer, features writer, author, and attorney. He is originally from Canada but grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He now enjoys life as a single dad raising a ridiculously-loved young girl on the beaches of the Gulf Coast. He is very much the dreamy mystic, a day without learning is a day not lived. He is passionate about his flower pots and studies philosophical science, religion, and non-mathematical principles of theoretical physics. Dogs, pizza, and love are proof that God exists. "Above all else, love one another."

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