* The raid was overwrought, but the managerial Obama clique can afford to be reckless: they control the domestic security services and appear to have the full cooperation of CIA and the Pentagon. We all know the role of the media. Look forward to weeks of strategic leaking from the Trump cache and the activation of astro-turf white nationalists just in time for the erection.
* Different sorts of documents get classified:
1) Summaries of the US government’s current take on world events and their current plans on how to deal with them — e.g., we don’t think Baby Kim will move against South Korea this month; if the PRC moves against Taiwan, here are our military options; etc.
2) Details on our human intelligence gathering: e.g., Colonel Yuri Ivanov, who is a CIA asset, tells us that Putin is seriously ill; our spy Colonel Kim tells us that Baby Kim is not ill; etc.
3) Technical details of our intelligence gathering technology, our military communications systems, our weapons systems, etc. that would enable adversaries to subvert or counter those system: e.g., here is the encryption/decryption codes we use to communicate with our nuclear sub fleet; here are self-destruct codes for our missiles; etc.
Items under category (1) are very hot at the time. But they grow stale. What the US Intel Community thought about Baby Kim or Putin is 2018 is now of only historical interest: it is of little value to our adversaries.
Items under category (2) could get people killed (Colonels Ivanov and Kim in my examples): these remain critical for many decades.
Items under category (3) could get us all killed: this, at least in my experience, is the bulk of the SCI classified material.
Now, the key point is that, as President, Trump had no reason to know or care or have an interest in anything in category (3) — i.e., the technical details of our weapons, intelligence-gathering, or communications technology.
The Donald is a real-estate developer: show him the schematics for our nuclear weapons, our spy satellites, or our military comm systems, and those design documents would be completely meaningless to Trump. Show them to me…. well, I am a physicist with experience in the defense industry: give me enough time with such documents, and I can tell you a lot!
And the Russians and Chinese have lots of people like me — they would love to get such documents, which is why they are very highly classified.
But Trump almost certainly never had such documents in his possession: he didn’t need to see them, and he would have had no interest in them.
Similarly, for documents in category (2) that give the actual names of overseas spies, etc.: Trump needed to know that Putin was sick, but Trump neither needed to know nor did he care that such data came from Colonel Ivanov, or Dr. Glazov, or some maid in the Kremlin named Masha.
Which leaves category (1). And I bet Trump did have some category (1) documents at Mar-a-Lago: i.e., summaries of US intelligence evaluations of what was going on in the world back in 2017 or 2019 or whatever.
But such summaries are now so stale as to be basically irrelevant.
A little secret that is rarely mentioned: a lot of US Intel analysts are basically frustrated academics who work for the CIA, DIA, or whatever. Much of their output is classified, but academics at, say, Stanford or Harvard or Georgetown produce similar studies that are, of course, not classified.
In fact, the most secret fact about the Intel Community’s reports to the President is that this is what is influencing the President’s thinking right now.
Again it becomes stale in a very short time: most of it really should be declassified within a few years.
I think Julie Kelly’s current column is correct: they are going to indict Trump over this.
But I am pretty sure they will be indicting him over documents in category (1), which contain information that is now no more critical than what you could get by reading old copies of Foreign Affairs or the Economist.
* What matters in this case is not the putative documents, but the following:
1) The very fact that law enforcement controlled by political actors raided the home of a political opponent.
2) The warrant was signed by a judge who is and has been a clear, vocal, outspoken opponent of the political opponent who was raided. A judge is a member of the judiciary branch in a government in which powers are supposed to be separated.
3) The raid was essentially condoned and carried out by people working for a president who ran against the former president and may have to run against him again.
4) Presidents have full authority over all classified information and can de-classify it and presumably do whatever they want with it, even take it home if they so choose, if they make that decision while they are the president.
5) A president is elected by The People to have full executive power and must by necessity be able to exercise that power without fear of reprisal by successors if he is to be able to carry out his duties and the will of The People who elected him.
This raid is completely wrong and would be wrong even if President Trump had decided to take home the secret formula for Coca-Cola. (Well, maybe THEN it would be called for. Some things are sacred.)
BTW, I have difficulty imagining that every document that matters in this case does not have one or more copies somewhere still safe, including electronic, virtual copies. It is actually quite quaint to think that going in and taking some boxes of paper will make a difference, but what do I know?
And again, it’s not the documents that matter. This is another in the long line of phony moves that the powers that be have made against Trump since even while he was running the first time. This is an attempt, one way or another, to hobble him, so slander him, to tie him up so he cannot run or win or harm them.
Also, the hypothesis is reasonable that this is really about documentation that proves the ratfucking that the FBI, CIA, powers that be, Clinton campaign, Obama administration, et. al. were doing. In fact, this raid is probably just a continuation of what the documents prove.
And I don’t even like Trump, though I voted for him. What other choice was there? What are our choices now, and do they even matter anymore? Did they ever really?
