A CLASSIC ANTI-TRUMP FRENZY. Beginning in the months before Donald Trump took office, and extending well into his presidency, the media and political world took a set of vague but serious accusations of wrongdoing involving the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia and created a 24/7 frenzy of talk about secret evidence, possible criminal charges, and allegedly grave damage to national security. Fed by leaks originating in federal law enforcement, the intelligence community, and interested lawyers, ostensibly responsible observers engaged in wild speculation — COLLUSION!!! — that was terribly damaging to then-President Trump. And here was the punch line: Nobody knew what the evidence was. It was secret, classified, grand jury, ongoing investigation, whatever. All the talk was based on little bits of information, and no one, at the time, had the big picture. The secrecy cloaking the details of the case allowed anti-Trump speculation to flourish.
By the time a multiyear criminal investigation, with all the powers of law enforcement, was unable to establish that conspiracy or coordination — collusion — had even occurred at all, the damage had been done. Trump-Russia had irreparably harmed the Trump presidency, and the lost years could not be recovered.
Now, with Trump 19 months out of the White House, it’s happening again.
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The issue, of course, is the allegation that Trump hid documents from his presidency at Mar-a-Lago, his winter home in Florida. By doing so, the allegation goes, Trump violated the Presidential Records Act, which requires that outgoing presidents turn over their papers to the National Archives and Records Administration. In addition, the allegation continues, some of the material Trump kept was classified, some of it at a high level.
But what is it? What is the material the FBI carted away from Mar-a-Lago? The recently released search warrant says things like “Miscellaneous Secret Documents” and “Miscellaneous Top Secret Documents” and, in one case, “Various classified/TS/SCI documents,” referring to “top secret/sensitive compartmented information,” referring to a higher classification level than simply top secret. That has led many media figures to characterize the case as deeply serious, with exposure of the Trump documents, “the nation’s secrets,” posing a “grave risk” to national security.
But again — what is in the documents? What are they about? We don’t know. And that is the key, the central, the most important thing to remember in this case. We are in a classic cycle of hair-on-fire Trump allegations, and we don’t know what they are about.
In a post on Lawfare, Jack Goldsmith, the Harvard Law School professor and former George W. Bush Justice Department official, wrote, “The prudence of [Attorney General Merrick] Garland’s judgment will turn to a large degree on the true sensitivity of the information there.” Goldsmith then quoted former President Barack Obama, who, in April 2016, at the height of the Hillary Clinton email affair, in which the former secretary of state was accused of mishandling classified information, defended Clinton by suggesting that too much government information is classified.
“I handle a lot of classified information,” Obama said. “There’s classified, and then there’s classified. There’s stuff that is really top secret, top secret, and there’s stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state that you might not want on the transom or going out over the wire but is basically stuff that you could get in open source.”
Obama was criticized for those remarks, Goldsmith noted, “yet there is truth in what Obama says.” As many critics, including the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), have noted, the U.S. government classifies way too much information. “It will matter a lot, in assessing Garland’s decisions, whether the information Trump had was closer to ‘really top-secret, top-secret’ or to information available in public,” Goldsmith wrote.
A few days before Goldsmith posted his piece, the Washington Post reported that “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought” in the Mar-a-Lago raid. Nuclear weapons! It can’t get any more serious than that! The story did not appear to be particularly strongly sourced. And beyond the word “nuclear,” the four reporters bylined on the piece did not seem to know what it meant. Indeed, in a podcast, one of the reporters, Shane Harris, noted that while “the FBI was concerned enough to launch a raid … it doesn’t seem that there was a kind of urgency attached to this.” When asked the level of concern the public should have, Harris answered, “On a scale of 1 to 10, put it at a 5 or 6 for now.”
None of that caution mattered. The word was out: Trump stole nuclear secrets! The most critical secrets a nation can possess! “Two words for you, my friend,” Joe Scarborough said on MSNBC. “Two words: nuclear secrets.” That said it all.
But the question remains: What does that mean? Did Trump have the nation’s nuclear weapons blueprints? Did he have some other nation’s secret weapons information? Or was it something else? Perhaps something frivolous, as Goldsmith suggested, like Trump bragging that his “nuclear button” was bigger than that of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. The answer will be important. (We do know, via the New York Times, that Trump, “when speaking about his friendly correspondence” with Kim, said of the letters, “They’re mine,” suggesting he was not too concerned about observing the Presidential Records Act.)
But of course, the answer is a secret. The Biden Justice Department is keeping it a secret. It won’t even release the affidavit supporting its request for a search warrant. And as long as the basic facts remain secret, the speculation can go on and on, at wilder and wilder levels, more and more damaging to Trump — not unlike what happened in the long media frenzy of 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019.
But here is something to think about. It is not an answer, but it is a way to think about a possible answer. We don’t know what the documents say, but we know Donald Trump. We know some of his interests, peculiarities, and obsessions. And what was his obsession during much of his presidency? It was what he called the Russia Russia Russia hoax — the Trump-Russia investigation. Trump believed he had been framed by federal law enforcement and the intelligence community and was obsessed with proving his innocence of the charge that he had colluded with Russia in the 2016 campaign.
During the first years of his presidency, Trump believed, correctly, that there were classified documents that undermined some of the allegations against him. He wanted the papers to be declassified so that the public could see the charges were false. Do you remember the Nunes memo? The name refers to former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), who in 2018 was the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. The memo proved that the FBI had used the Steele dossier, the collection of false and outrageous allegations against Trump created by a former British spy in the pay of the Clinton campaign, to win a secret wiretapping warrant against Carter Page, a low-level former Trump campaign aide. It was all very crooked, as Trump might say.
The Nunes memo was sensational news at the time, but it was based on classified information. Trump wanted it released. The FBI and Democrats howled. FBI director Christopher Wray said he had “grave concerns” about the release. The Justice Department said the release would be “extraordinarily reckless.” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), then the ranking member and now the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said releasing the Nunes memo “crossed a dangerous line.” Committee Democrats said releasing the memo would “risk public exposure of sensitive sources and methods.”
Trump had the final decision to release the memo. He did it, it was made public, and it did not cross any dangerous lines. But it did expose FBI and Justice Department misconduct in the Trump-Russia investigation.
Trump wanted more declassification. In May 2019, he gave then-Attorney General William Barr “full and complete authority” to declassify documents related to the Trump-Russia investigation. Some of the same people who had opposed the release of the Nunes memo opposed any further declassifications. Schiff, for example, said such a move would be “dangerous.”
“The resistance to Barr’s work is likely to be ferocious,” I wrote on May 27, 2019. “Almost immediately after President Trump ordered intelligence agencies to cooperate with Barr and gave the attorney general ‘full and complete authority’ to declassify information from the Trump-Russia investigation, the intelligence world struck back when the New York Times reported that Barr’s project could endanger one of the CIA’s most prized sources.” (The paper reported that the CIA had a source very close to Putin whose identity might be blown by Barr’s declassification. But, of course, publishing that story meant the source’s existence had just been revealed — by the New York Times.)
A huge fight over declassification ensued. Trump won some, but other documents remained classified. Trump always wanted more, more, more declassification. He always faced resistance. He left office still wanting to declassify more documents.
Fast forward to today. There’s a fight over Trump and classified documents. Trump says he declassified them. On the other side are the Justice Department, the FBI, and Democrats. What do you suppose this document fight might be about? There are well-connected Republicans who believe it is about what it has always been about — Trump’s desire to declassify documents from the Russia investigation, documents that tended to exonerate him, versus the continuing desire in law enforcement and the intelligence community to keep its own actions secret.
As one Republican theorized Monday evening, Trump, in his final weeks in office, was concerned that the still-classified documents might simply disappear once he left office. They would never be declassified, never be available to show that the Russia Russia Russia hoax was really a hoax. So he wanted to make sure he had some of the papers himself. The Republican explained that it was just a theory, but it was a well-informed theory.
What’s striking about the Mar-a-Lago documents affair is that some of the same players are playing the same roles they played in earlier versions of this controversy. Of course, there’s Trump. Then there’s Wray, the FBI director. And don’t forget Schiff. On Saturday, the Intelligence Committee chairman wrote to the director of national intelligence requesting an immediate “damage assessment” of the Trump Mar-a-Lago papers. Damage assessment? It’s possible there might be little to no damage, except to Schiff’s old claims of collusion.
What is needed, of course, is what was needed during the Trump-Russia affair: transparency. The public needs to know what documents are at issue in the Mar-a-Lago investigation and whether those documents warrant the Justice Department’s and FBI’s actions in pursuit of them. The public needs facts, facts, facts. And without some actual facts to evaluate, we’re all stuck in a replay of 2018.
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