Was Trump Illegally Hoarding “Classified Documents Relating To Nuclear Weapons”?
© AP Photo / Evan Vucci
He claims that everything is a “hoax,” but he also wants you to know that the “word is” that Obama allegedly retained nuclear information.
On August 9, just one day after FBI agents had arrived at former President Donald Trump’s opulent Palm Beach, Florida, resort to carrying out a court-approved search warrant on the property, longtime Republican strategist Alice Stewart appeared on CNN to declare that “anything short of finding the nuclear codes at Mar-a-Lago is going to hugely backfire on the Biden administration.”
As it turns out, Stewart’s analysis may have been more right than she intended, with a new report from The Washington Post claiming the FBI was searching for “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons,” among other items the former president may have been illegally hoarding. Per the Post:
The people who described some of the material that agents were seeking spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. They did not offer additional details about what type of information the agents were seeking, including whether it involved weapons belonging to the United States or some other nation. Nor did they say if such documents were recovered as part of the search.
Okay, so some reasonable skepticism is called for here. But the mere suggestion of nuclear weapons data being incorrectly stored is… bad.
Meanwhile, Trump has decried the whole thing as a “hoax,” accused the FBI of “planting information” during their investigation, and on Friday morning, reached way back into his deflective bag of tricks to claim that “word is” former President Barack Obama was actually the one who absconded with nuclear secrets.
Although the search request was signed not only by a U.S. attorney but also by Jay Bratt, the head of the DOJ’s Counterintelligence and Security Division, the Justice Department indicated Thursday in its filing to unseal the warrant used in the raid that there was some significant national security justification for the search request.
Even Trump’s most loyal supporters in Congress ought to understand how seriously screwed up the situation is given its potential severity, right? We’re talking about congressional Republicans, you sweet summertime child! So when a group of House GOP members conducted a press conference on Friday morning, we got these gems:
Hey man, what even are nuclear secrets, anyway? Maybe YOU have some on your iPhone 6S! Besides, [extremely internet pedant voice] her emails!!!
As per Mic, in fact when asked about Thursday’s attempted mass shooting at an FBI office in Cincinnati, Ohio — one seemingly prompted by conspiratorial anger over the Mar-a-Lago raid — some of the lawmakers chose instead to focus on the congressional baseball game shooting that occurred five years ago in a desperate attempt to counterbalance an attack that was attempted by one of the former president’s supporters just one day earlier.
And thus, here we are: A former president who may have returned home with his nuclear football and a group of supporters who would rather talk baseball and aliens. Everything is quite awful. And if the past is any indication of the future, things will only grow worse and more foolish from here.
