(No they aren’t…)
David Ignatius of the Washington Post discusses why Trump wanted to keep all those classified documents:
A former Trump administration official who knows him well likens Trump’s retention of classified documents to “a toddler who takes a toy and sees how much the other kid is upset and decides, I’m going to take it anyway. The more someone wants to take it back, the more he wants to keep it.”
Trump’s presidency was a war against what he imagined was a “deep state” of FBI agents, intelligence officials and Justice Department lawyers conspiring to smear him and block his election and reelection. In the words of his lawyers’ motion, these antagonists behaved with “complete disdain and bias against President Trump and his supporters, while they were entrusted with probing the farcical Russian collusion claims.”
A field commander in Trump’s battles against the intelligence community has been a former congressional staffer named Kash Patel, now one of Trump’s representatives in dealing with the National Archives. I profiled Patel’s role as Trump’s advocate against the intelligence agencies last year, and again recently. After bringing Patel to his National Security Council staff in 2019, Trump wanted to make him deputy FBI director, then deputy CIA director.
“Trump also had the idea of making Patel a Special Assistant for White House Oversight — a position that would seek to expose the deep state” in the White House entourage, said Charles Kupperman, a former deputy national security adviser, who was in the room with Trump when he made the proposal in 2019. When Kupperman and White House counsel Pat Cipollone objected, Trump relented, the official said.
A spokeswoman for Patel didn’t respond to a query about Kupperman’s account of the 2019 incident but accused the author of being a “disinformation fountain” for “radical-left politicians in D.C.”
Trump’s notion of supreme personal power — his document narcissism — might have caught up with him in the Mar-a-Lago search. His problem isn’t simply with the Biden Justice Department, but with informants who are presumably within his own circle. U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart, who granted the warrant, made that clear in his order delaying a final judgment about unsealing the affidavit that accompanied the warrant.
“I agree with the Government that the Affidavit ‘contains, among other critically important and detailed investigative facts: highly sensitive information about witnesses, including witnesses interviewed by the government,’” Reinhart wrote. Notably, he said that revealing details could “impede the ongoing investigation through obstruction of justice and witness intimidation or retaliation.” He also cited obstruction as “one of the statutes for which I found probable cause” in authorizing the search.
No wonder Trump’s lawyers filed a motion designed to slow things down, portraying the case as a political vendetta and aimed at slowing the review of documents. They simply ignored the gravity of the charges — calling the search “a shockingly aggressive move” against “the clear frontrunner” in 2024, “should he decide to run.”
Whatever those documents contain, Reinhart shared Justice’s worry that they weren’t being given back promptly or securely held.
I think we also need to worry that Trump’s “war with the deep state” may have motivated him to take documents that would further that war. Yes, he is like a toddler and he might just be having a temper tantrum. But he is also a vengeful monster who could easily have thought it was a good idea to collect information that he believed might harm the intelligence community or certain individuals without regard to how it would harm actual humans. He cares nothing for actual humans.
Assuming that Trump just wanted some mementos or planned to share them at cocktail parties with friends, while disturbing in its own right and definitely illegal, is a mistake. He may very well have much more nefarious motives. This man is corrupt through and through and his desire for revenge and willingness to make a buck or achieve power by any means necessary has been well demonstrated.