The unimaginable just became imaginable

I’ve been rolling around in my mind the idea that Trump may have taken secret nuclear documents out of the White House with him to Mar a Lago. Several questions come to mind: How? They don’t just have nuclear documents sitting around the White House. He had to have asked for them and had someone go to wherever they’re kept and get them for him. Why? He had to have had a reason. It’s not like a document marked TS/SCI makes for a wonderful souvenir of your time as president.

It fits with his ego. He would have reasoned that as president, he had the authority to declassify anything, so nobody could come after him for taking top secret stuff with him when he left the White House because he had declassified it already. But he wouldn’t have known that nuclear secrets cannot be declassified by the president by executive order because they come under an entirely different sort of classification law passed by the Congress specifically to prevent this sort of thing.

And then there is the matter of what purpose could they have served. I speculated that because the first and last thing on his mind every day of his life has been money that he may have wanted to sell the nuclear information to the highest bidder. Who might that be? Why, his friend Vladimir Putin, of course.

And then I remembered what actually happened in Helsinki in 2018 when Trump and Putin disappeared for their private meeting not in the presence of any of Trump’s advisers or national security officials like his National Security Advisor or the Secretary of State. Trump and Putin met with only one interpreter present — Putin’s — because Trump told his own interpreter to leave the room. Why would he do that?

Only the American interpreter could ever be subject to a subpoena or a warrant for his or her notes. Merrick Garland or any other American law enforcement official could never get to Putin or his interpreter in Russia. Trump subtracted from that encounter anyone who could ever reveal what was said by him to Putin or by Putin to him. That meeting is an unimaginable black hole in our history.

But the unimaginable just became imaginable. We won’t need to know what Trump and Putin talked about if what was removed from Mar a Lago by the FBI includes United States nuclear secrets that would be useful to and desired by Vladimir Putin and Russia or Iran or any other enemy state.

Why Donald Trump had nuclear secrets in his safe or in his basement at Mar a Lago will be a question that answers itself.