What happened to all the missing secrets?
You may remember Cassidy Hutchinson saying that Mark Meadows took a binder full of information about the Russia investigation home with him during her January 6 Committee testimony:
According to transcripts released by the Jan. 6 committee last year, in closed-door testimony, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson told the committee she was “almost positive” the binder went home with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
“I don’t think that would have been something that he would have destroyed. It was not returned anywhere, and it never left our office to go internally anywhere. It stayed in our safe in the office safe most of the time,” Hutchinson said, adding that she realized the binder was no longer in the safe on her last day at the White House.
CNN has new reporting on what went on and the enduring mystery of the missing binder continues.
A binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, raising alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
Its disappearance, which has not been previously reported, was so concerning that intelligence officials briefed Senate Intelligence Committee leaders last year about the missing materials and the government’s efforts to retrieve them, the sources said.
In the two-plus years since Trump left office, the missing intelligence does not appear to have been found.
The binder contained raw intelligence the US and its NATO allies collected on Russians and Russian agents, including sources and methods that informed the US government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election, sources tell CNN.
The intelligence was so sensitive that lawmakers and congressional aides with top secret security clearances were able to review the material only at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where their work scrutinizing it was itself kept in a locked safe.
The binder was last seen at the White House during Trump’s final days in office. The former president had ordered it brought there so he could declassify a host of documents related to the FBI’s Russia investigation. Under the care of then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, the binder was scoured by Republican aides working to redact the most sensitive information so it could be declassified and released publicly.
The Russian intelligence was just a small part of the collection of documents in the binder, described as being 10 inches thick and containing reams of information about the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. But the raw intelligence on Russia was among its most sensitive classified materials, and top Trump administration officials repeatedly tried to block the former president from releasing the documents.
The day before leaving office, Trump issued an order declassifying most of the binder’s contents, setting off a flurry of activity in the final 48 hours of his presidency. Multiple copies of the redacted binder were created inside the White House, with plans to distribute them across Washington to Republicans in Congress and right-wing journalists.
Instead, copies initially sent out were frantically retrieved at the direction of White House lawyers demanding additional redactions.
Just minutes before Joe Biden was inaugurated, Meadows rushed to the Justice Department to hand-deliver a redacted copy for a last review. Years later, the Justice Department has yet to release all of the documents, despite Trump’s declassification order. Additional copies with varying levels of redactions ended up at the National Archives.
But an unredacted version of the binder containing the classified raw intelligence went missing amid the chaotic final hours of the Trump White House. The circumstances surrounding its disappearance remain shrouded in mystery.
We knew that Trump was determined to declassify all this stuff believing that it somehow exonerated him. Of course it didn’t and I would guess that most of the “redactions” done by his staff had little to do with classified secrets and more to do with information that pointed to Russian interference on Trump’s behalf.
They didn’t find it at Mar-a-Lago. Mark Meadows insists that he didn’t take it. So where is it?
Mr. Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, had a copy of material from the binder given to at least one conservative writer, according to testimony and court filings.
But when Justice Department officials expressed concerns that sharing some of the material would breach the Privacy Act at a time when the department was already being sued by Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page for having publicly released some of their texts, the copies were hastily retrieved, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Trump was deeply focused on what was in the binder, a person close to him said. Even after leaving the White House, Mr. Trump still wanted to push information from the binder into the public eye. He suggested, during an April 2021 interview for a book about the Trump presidency, that Mr. Meadows still had the material.
“I would let you look at them if you wanted,” Mr. Trump said in the interview. “It’s a treasure trove.”
Mr. Trump did not address a question about whether he himself had some of the material. But when a Trump aide present for the interview asked him, “Does Meadows have those?” Mr. Trump replied, “Meadows has them.”
“We had pretty much won that battle,” Mr. Trump added, referring to questions about whether his 2016 campaign had worked with Russia. “There was no collusion. There was no nothing. And I think it was maybe past its prime. It would be sort of a cool book for you to look at.”
Suuuuuure. He’d love to show it to the media but he doesn’t have it. Talk to Mark, maybe he’ll show it to you.
And where did it come from in the first place? Well, the usual suspects, of course:
The binder’s origins trace back to 2018, when Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, led by Chairman Devin Nunes, compiled a classified report alleging the Obama administration skewed intelligence in its assessment that Putin had worked to help Trump in the 2016 election.
The GOP report, which criticized the intelligence community’s “tradecraft,” scrutinized the highly classified intelligence from 2016 that informed the assessment Putin and Russia sought to assist Trump’s campaign. House Republicans cut a deal with the CIA in which the committee brought in a safe for its documents that was then placed inside a CIA vault – a setup that prompted some officials to characterize it as a “turducken” or a “safe within a safe.”
It truly is the sign of a nation in decline that it would elect such imbeciles to govern it.
The Republicans on the Committee said the intelligence was rigged by former Obama officials to exclude intelligence that would have shown that the Russians really wanted Hillary Clinton to win. Seriously. The Democrats said that was nonsense, of course, and their view was validated by the bipartisan Senate report which found that they actually preferred Donald Trump.
It seems there will never be an end to revelations of just how corrupt Trump’s administration actually was. Sure, some of the people on the inside did what they could to stop them from doing their worst but so many didn’t. And we know that next time no one will even try.
And by the way, here’s another enduring mystery: why in the hell has Mark Meadows not been charged by the Special Counsel nor does he seem to be a cooperating witness? What’s up with that? The guy is in the middle everything. On the other hand, a federal appeals court heard his appeal to move his Georgia case to federal court and they didn’t sound convinced. So, at least there’s that. Trump can’t pardon him for that crime.
Happy Hollandaise everyone!