Elephants in the room

New issues in FBI search

Issue number one:  the hearing in Federal Court in Miami yesterday about whether to release the affidavit of sensitive information establishing the probable cause the DOJ used to get the search warrant for Trump’s residence in Palm Beach, Mar a Lago.

The short version is, we’ll probably get a redacted version of the warrant affidavit next week.  The judge in the case, Bruce E. Rheinhart, heard arguments from both sides:  representatives of the New York Times, Washington Post, and other media outlets suing for the release of the document, and the Department of Justice, which sought the warrant in the first place.  In the end, he ruled that the DOJ should come back to court next week with a redacted version of the affidavit, and the judge would consider releasing it then.  He said it was “very important that the public can have as much information as it can” about the unprecedented search of a former president’s personal residence and office.

For its part, the DOJ argued vociferously against releasing the affidavit, calling the document a “road map” for the DOJ investigation of the president’s handling of government documents.  Releasing the document “could harm other high-profile investigations.  Speaking for the government, Jay Bratt, the chief of the counterintelligence office of its National Security Division, did not say more about which investigations would be harmed.  Referring to evidence provided by witnesses interviewed by the FBI, Bratt also told the judge that “there is a real concern not just for the safety of these witnesses, but to chill other witnesses who may come forward and cooperate.”  Releasing the search warrant affidavit could also provide Trump’s lawyers with key information the DOJ had gathered about the reasons Trump had the sensitive documents at his residence.

Trump himself has called for releasing the unredacted version of the search warrant affidavit, which may be another instance of Trump bluffing, as he did when he said he was going to release the CCTV footage from Mar a Lago showing the FBI searching his home.  We have yet to see it, of course, and his lawyers were not a party to the hearing in Miami.  They filed no motion and did not speak at the hearing.  Trump lawyer Christina Bobb, however, watched the proceeding from the public gallery.  

Which brings up issue number two:  why did Trump keep the rather large trove of top secret, secret, and confidential documents in the first place? The New York Times published a story today by its chief Trump-watcher, Maggie Haberman, exploring just that question.  “As with so much else related to Mr. Trump, there is no easy answer,” Haberman wrote before exploring three possible reasons: 

Trump thought of himself not as president, but as a king who could do whatever he wanted.  “He seems to honestly believe that everything he touches belongs to him,” Haberman quoted one lawyer saying who handles national security cases on a regular basis. 

He was a pack rat and a braggart, was the second reason the Times gave for Trump’s hoard of sensitive government documents.  Haberman referred to the usual suspects, former national security adviser John Bolton, who was the source of stories about Trump keeping highly secret documents and satellite images that he would then put up on his Twitter feed that at one time went out to some 63 million people.  And of course, there was former chief of staff John Kelly, who claims to have been one of the “adults” in the White House who tried to maintain “guardrails” around Trump and in the process ran afoul of the Pack Rat In Chief and was fired. 

The third theory explored in the Times story was that Trump was a baby who grabs “sort of whatever he wants to grab for whatever reason,” according to Bolton. “‘He may not even fully appreciate’ why he did certain things,” Haberman quoted as saying.  One reason he may have wanted certain documents, Haberman speculated, was that “they contained details about people he knew” such as President Emmanuel Macron of France.  One document mentioned in the inventory was revealed to have been about the French president.

Now we’re getting somewhere!  I thought as I read the Times story.  But alas, Haberman did not take the next step and speculate that Trump may have wanted to keep highly sensitive information about foreign leaders because he might want to use it to get something out of them in the future.

Which is the elephant in the room, if you ask me.  Trump has never drawn a breath when he wasn’t thinking about money, power, or revenge, and there is probably no better source to get all three than the top secret information he was privy to as president and took with him to Mar a Lago.  I’ve speculated here previously that Trump may have wanted to sell some of the top secret information and benefit monetarily.  But he wouldn’t have to go that far.  Some of it may be of a nature that he could use to get favorable treatment in foreign countries for his future business ventures.  Trump famously had ambitions to build a Trump hotel in Moscow and has built hotels and condos in other foreign countries such as Panama and Azerbaijan and others I’m sure I’ve forgotten.

But there’s a second, invisible elephant in the room nobody has yet talked about:  The Central Intelligence Agency, which has agents around the world ferreting out information 365 days a year; the National Security Agency, our “big ears” on the world that downloads zillions of bits of electronic information daily, everything from emails and texts and conversations on tapped phones to decoded top secret information from foreign governments and corporations doing business overseas; and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which gathers information on the military capabilities and intentions of both hostile and friendly foreign governments.

It seems reasonable to think that the DOJ search warrant affidavit could contain information gathered by any one or all three of our intelligence services about what Trump may have been planning to do with the documents he was so reluctant to let go of that the FBI was forced to search his home and seize them from him.  Those three intelligence agencies are tasked with gathering foreign, not domestic intelligence, so it wouldn’t have taken a domestic warrant to listen in on any business Trump may have been doing overseas.  The voices, emails, and texts of Americans are regularly swept up especially by the NSA’s web of electronic intelligence gathering, and when Americans are suspected of doing something potentially illegal overseas, they can be pursued criminally in this country using the information gathered by the CIA, NSA, or DIA. 

So that’s where we are, waiting for the court in Florida to release the redacted version of the search warrant affidavit.  I heard one expert on MSNBC today saying that what we get may amount to gibberish with all the redactions, but I’m sure there will be the same sort of hints and glimpses of relevant facts and materials we were able to get from the search warrant and inventory of stuff that was seized from Mar a Lago.  That’s where we learned that Trump has been under investigation for months by a grand jury for violating three federal statutes, one of which was, as you read here first, the Espionage Act.

Stay tuned.