The day after: What we know and don't know

I live 53 miles due north of Bedminster, New Jersey, where Donald Trump spends his summers at his golf resort, and I haven’t heard any explosions or felt any earthquakes this morning.  All seems to be quiet as the former president deals with the fallout from yesterday’s blockbuster revelation that the FBI search of his home in Palm Beach was done because he is under criminal investigation. 

There weren’t any other truly astounding revelations yesterday.  We already knew he had taken materials from the White House to Mar a Lago that he had no legal right to take.  We already knew that some of those materials were secret because the first 15 boxes of stuff he returned to the National Archives contained some top-secret documents. We already knew we weren’t going to get “visibility” – my new favorite buzzword – into what was in the top secret documents the FBI seized, and we didn’t.

Instead, we got a general list of the stuff taken by the FBI that included three boxes of “miscellaneous top-secret documents,” four boxes of “miscellaneous secret documents,” 3 boxes of “confidential documents,” and one box they termed “various classified TS/SCI documents,” indicating that these “various” documents were among what we might call the top-est top secrets this nation holds.

MSNBC practically held a party to celebrate what we learned, so I went over to Fox to see what they were doing.  They weren’t even trying to defend Trump.  Fox host Bret Baier was in Palm Beach talking to not one, but two blonde Fox hosts above a chyron reading “Fox News Reviews Trump Search Warrant.”  “Bret, you’ve had a chance to do some reporting on this.  Tell us what you found,” one of the hosts said. 

Bret was sanguine to the point of somnambulant, telling the hosts – who looked like they could be fraternal twins but had different last names – basically not to worry because of the 11 boxes “there is only one” box that’s listed as containing TS/SCI.  “That’s the hot stuff,” Bret explained.  “That’s the stuff you have to go into a special room to handle.”  Bret continued, “I just want to point out, it’s not like they have voluminous boxes of this most classified material.”