It takes a lot of people to circumvent the systems that keep the kind of top secret stuff Trump took top secret, so this really suggests to me that the White House was a free-for-all by the time he left it, and that's pretty bad. I mean, national security is kind of important, right? And this breach of our national security by one mad ex-employee feels like we are not really as secure as we want to be. He clearly had help--and still has defenders.
I'm calling Trump a disgruntled ex-employee in part because there is an argument made that Trump isn't bound by the PRA because he isn't an employee of the USG, etc. He was though. As an ex-president, I guess he hasn't got any business to do anything with presidential records, now. But a president is a public servant. He serves the US people. Or he's supposed to.
Trump didn't serve us especially well, and that is why he didn't get re-elected. We knew from all kinds of things he didn't deserve re-election. His COVID-19 response. The impeachment over blackmailing our Ukrainian ally. Helsinki. The realization that Barr fixed the Mueller report. The constant disparagement of our press and our electoral system. Culminating in an insurrection attempt, which his fans try to pretend didn't happen or wasn't his fault. But he stopped being an employee when he stopped being president. And he definitely could not have declassified all these docs while he was president without some record of it.
There doesn't seem to be any evidence he did.
Anyway, there's ample evidence of Trump not giving a shit about what intelligence he burned. He gave up intelligence to Lavrov in the Oval office. He outed Iran intelligence to Twitter. A Russian-based asset was moved in 2017 because of the threat a Russian-compromised Trump posed to national security. He was a hot mess. This is why the idea that Humint and FISA were a part of the already-recovered docs before the "raid" has my interest. What damage could be done with that to our field operatives? What blackmail/extortion threats existed from it? Since we know very well this is how Trump rolls?
Republicans are perhaps feigning ignorance about the extraordinary breach of US intelligence this represents. Take John Yoo. He's been an idiot for years, and probably still doesn't understand why a dictator would try to legalize the crushing of a baby's nuts. He also doesn't know why we can't immediately reveal the supposedly declassified Trump docs. As if he can't entertain why they were classified in the first place, who this classification protects and why, and whether some larger picture than "proving Trump right" exists.
Trump and his lolyers are holding onto a memory of when Trump was president, but he isn't. Republicans are holding onto a memory of when they were respectable, but they elected Trump and is, evidently, dealing in state secrets and an insurrectionist. And they still support him.
And when Mick Mulvaney cries that this is a sad paper chase, I can only tell you every day people die chasing paper. Aldrich Ames and the Rosenbergs dealt in US papers. What he's saying is just some goddamn ignorant cope. These aren't recipe cards and CVS receipts.
I think your memory of Trump needs to allow for the reality that he may have taken our top secrets for personal gain and it was always entirely in character for him to do that.
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