A Former President Stealing Nuclear Secrets Used to Be the Stuff of Fiction
A former president stealing nuclear secrets. Seriously. Have we seen everything yet?
If I were to pitch to you a story in which a former corrupt president of the United States absconded with top secret nuclear documents, one might assume it’s either too cliche or simply too far fetched to be plausible.
Then again, it might be just the type of Tom Clancy-esque thriller to fly off bookstore shelves.
Either way, it has to be fiction, right?
Welcome to the United States of America in the year 2022, where a former reality TV slumlord with no political experience or acumen was elected president despite losing the popular vote, was twice impeached, refuses to accept he lost re-election, and fled the White House with classified documents, some of which, we now know, contained nuclear intelligence information.
In other words, Donald Trump, former president of the United States, stole nuclear secrets.
Myriad questions abound.
To whom did he show them?
Who packed the boxes that ultimately wound up unsecured at his Florida home?
Is the $2 billion his son-in-law received from the kingdom of Saudi Arabia connected in any way?
Whose nuclear secrets are they?
There is reason to believe they are those of a yet-unnamed foreign government.
As The Washington Post reported:
“A document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities, was found by FBI agents who searched former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and private club last month, according to people familiar with the matter, underscoring concerns among U.S. intelligence officials about classified material stashed in the Florida property.
“Some of the seized documents detail top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them….
“Investigators grew alarmed, according to one person familiar with the search, as they began to review documents retrieved from the club’s storage closet, Trump’s residence and his office in August. The team soon came upon records that are extremely restricted, so much so that even some of the senior-most national security officials in the Biden administration weren’t authorized to review them.”
Considering there are nine nuclear-armed nations, including our own, the list isn’t that long, and knowing Trump’s affinity for authoritarian leaders, it’s likely they were the eager recipients.
William Rivers Pit, senior editor and lead columnist for Truthout, wrote:
“Who knows what country those nuke documents were describing. Israel? China? Russia? Does it even matter at this juncture? Thanks to a million profit-driven war decisions made over the last 80 years, we exist within a wildly delicate latticework of perils that are mostly left over from the Cold War. Not our fault, but all our problem.”
MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade explained on “Morning Joe”:
“I think there are two things about this that are very significant. One is, regardless of classification level, it is clear now that this relates to national defense information, and that’s the language of the Espionage Act. So Donald Trump can claim to have declassified documents all day. He might even have been successful, and that would be no defense to the claim. The other thing that I think is significant about this is it makes it almost impossible for the Justice Department to decline to bring criminal charges.”
While Trump may have delayed the Justice Department’s investigation for a little while after federal judge Aileen Cannon granted access to a “special master” to sift through every document to determine which are covered under “executive privilege” Trump no longer has, the DOJ plans to appeal. Even some conservatives — including Trump’s own former attorney general Bill Barr — believe it will win.
A former president stealing nuclear secrets.
Seriously.
Have we seen everything yet?