We know a lot about how the classified documents made their way to Mar A Lago:
- tRump is an obsessive collector — if he didn’t have people cleaning up after him, I imagine he’d show up on one of those hoarder shows on TV
- For visual proof of this, go look at pics of his office in tRump tOwer.
- As per John Bolton, if tRump fancied a classified doc in an Oval Office meeting, he would just keep it, perhaps saying ‘I want to read it some more later’, and nobody had the gumption/temerity/horsepower to tell him no.
- He would take the docs, pics, clippings, etc. up to his bedroom and stash them away.
- Lots of people knew about this, but as president he had the legal right to do it.
- Until 1/6/21, the tRumpies had no plans to vacate the WH — ever.
- After 1/6/21, the tRumpies were… um… rather disorganized. The coup failed. They had 2 weeks to get out.
- Mark Meadows told people (Cippilone?) that he would take care of recovering the classified docs.
- Mark Meadows didn’t do that — duh!
- Moving day happened.
Here is a picture, from 1/14/21, of what seems to be some of the 50 or more boxes and bins of documents and other stuff that was shipped to Mar A Lago in a moving truck.
So we have a pretty good idea how those documents ended up in the storage room at Mar A Lago, and we’re learning more and more about what has happened to them since they got there. My question has to do with what happened — or didn’t — at the White House — and CIA, and DOD, and DOJ, etc. — starting on 1/20/21 at 12:01pm, the moment we all heaved a huge sigh of relief.
I’m focusing on the documents classified as TS/SCI, of which dozens have been recovered. These are special documents, so sensitive that they are ‘compartmentalized’ to further restrict access to a sub-set of even people with Top Secret clearances. These are our nation’s most important secrets, and they are tightly controlled. They are stored in a ‘Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), logged in and out, hand-carried from place to place, and only viewed by those who not only have a Top Secret clearance AND access to that specific ‘compartment’, but also have a legitimate need to know the information contained in that document.
Every time tRump walked off with a TS/SCI document — which, again, he had the legal right to do — the government employee, for instance a CIA briefer, would have to go back to the SCIF it came from and log the location of the document as something like ‘POTUS has it’. It was known to the inner circle that tRump took them up to his bedroom and stashed them — like a hoarder — with all the pictures of him and newspaper clippings of him, etc.
Back to that huge sigh of relief moment on 1/20/21. Every custodian of every SCIF with at least 1 TS/SCI document logged out a ‘POTUS has it’ now had a big problem: POTUS didn’t have it anymore.
FPOTUS had it — FORMER POTUS… and FPOTUS had no legal right to those documents.
Many of those TS/SCI documents would probably have been signed out from the SCIF in the basement of the White House. That’s why when I visualize the moment President Joe Biden (I still love typing that) and his new WH staff entered the West Wing, I see some poor document custodian from the basement SCIF jumping up and down, waving their TS/SCI document log and screaming at the top of their lungs something like:
‘HELP! CALL THE FBI! THERE’S 53 TS/SCI DOCUMENTS MISSING!!!’
(followed by a dramatic dissolution into a puddle of goo as the gnome from the basement SCIF contemplated spending the rest of his life at Leavenworth)
That’s what should have happened…. but it didn’t, obviously. Nothing happened.
Well, not nothing — the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) got wind that tRump shipped a bunch of Presidential Records — which don’t belong to an FPOTUS — to Mar A Lago, and spent a year asking politely and coaxing him to return them. At no time during that year was there any mention of classified documents, let alone TS/SCI docs.
Then, when tRump sent back 15 boxes of stuff in January 2022 — by commercial carrier — and NARA officials opened them, they were shocked to find classified documents, including TS/SCI docs, in 14 of the boxes. That’s when the ‘OH, SHIT’ moment and the panicked call to the FBI happened.
NARA had no clue there might be classified documents in those boxes, because otherwise they would never have let tRump ship them up to DC via UPS or a moving company.
What happened? Or, more importantly, what didn’t happen? And why not?
Can anybody explain why nothing happened? Or what I missed?
The closest I can come is that the SCIF custodians assumed that all the TS/SCI documents in tRump’s possession had been turned over to NARA along with the rest of the presidential records, as normally happens during a change of administration. So they just changed the logging from ‘POTUS has it’ to ‘NARA has it’. And never confirmed that with NARA, who never knew there were TS/SCI documents missing.
OK, that’s pretty weak — I admit it. It assumes multiple SCIF custodians pencil-whipping away a problem with accounting for some of the most sensitive and highly-classified documents our nation possesses. It’s scary to even contemplate.
But something like that happened. We know that because over a year passed before there was any interest in missing classified documents.
So I can’t figure it out, and it needs an explanation. Anybody?
Cheers.