On the one hand, this makes sense. It makes perfect sense that the ever-paranoid Donald Trump believed that he’d find documents that proved the so-called Deep State was out to get him. On the other hand, this report doesn’t reference anything about nuclear secrets. Of course, just because Donald Trump sought documents that made it appear that he was persecuted by the Deep State, it certainly doesn’t mean that he didn’t also take other documents to bribe the FBI or sell them to his autocratic cronies.

According to the NYT Tim Weiner on CNN this morning with John Berman, Trump wanted to wipe the stain off his impeachments:

The Mar-a-Lago papers may well determine if Mr. Trump has a political future. That depends, in part, on the solution to several mysteries. What is in those files? Where did they come from? Whose fingerprints are on them? And who shows up on the surveillance tapes subpoenaed from the Trump mansion, which will show who went in and out of the rooms where they were hidden?”

“I think in the last chaotic days of the Trump administration, Donald Trump was desperate for documents that he thought would somehow absolve him of the offenses for which he was impeached and criminally investigated. I think that he believes that there is some smoking gun in the classified archives of the government that will somehow cleanse him and allow him to run again, that will provide him with political leverage.”

Okay, that makes perfect sense. But Weinstein loses track a bit here:

Whether these documents are, in fact, helpful to the president or not is immaterial! He has no right to have them. They are the property of the American people, not a twice-impeached former president.”

True. But if you’re going to charge the former president with a crime, you need something beyond documents that he thinks help prove that he’s innocent of something. Thankfully, those documents are surely also there. The FBI didn’t drop “nuclear documents” as a misdirection that would be fatal to a case.

He gets back on track when discussing Trump putting his “loyalists” in place:

That’s right. In the last year of his administration, President Trump put unqualified loyalists at the top of the intelligence community and the Pentagon, and he wanted them to rifle through the classified files in search of documents, which he believed would somehow cleanse him of the stain of his impeachments and of the counterintelligence investigation, the FBI launched six full years ago against Donald Trump and his inner circle.”

TRUMP FIRED THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE AFTER LOSING THE ELECTION! If that doesn’t scream that something was very wrong, we’re not sure what might.

“These documents may or may not be what he was looking for. In other words, he wanted his own set of secret files that he thought would be political ammunition and I believe that’s what’s in those boxes.”

Well, we – this site – believe it’s entirely plausible that he had those exact “type” of files but believe that he also took documents that he could sell on the open market, or at least blackmail the FBI and DOJ with; “Arrest me and I release these everywhere, you have no idea who has them!” Those documents must be the ones that pertain to nuclear secrets, the ones that DOJ most needs in order to file a criminal case. It must not look political even if he had no right to possess the documents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=495PRT3nQUc

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[email protected], @JasonMiciak, with Nicole Hickman