Um, was Trump hoarding “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons”?
He says the whole thing is a “hoax” but would also like to you to know that “word is” Obama kept nuclear info, too.
On Aug. 9, just one day after FBI agents arrived at former President Donald Trump’s exclusive Palm Beach, Florida, resort to execute a court-approved search warrant on the property, longtime Republican strategist Alice Stewart appeared on CNN to declare that “anything short of finding the nuclear codes at Mar-a-Lago is going to hugely backfire on the Biden administration.”
As it turns out, Stewart’s analysis may have been more right than she intended, with a new report from The Washington Post claiming the FBI was searching for “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons,” among other items the former president may have been illegally hoarding. Per the Post:
The people who described some of the material that agents were seeking spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. They did not offer additional details about what type of information the agents were seeking, including whether it involved weapons belonging to the United States or some other nation. Nor did they say if such documents were recovered as part of the search.
So, okay, some healthy skepticism is warranted here. But the fact that there’s even a whiff of improperly stored nuclear weapons information seems ... bad.
Trump, meanwhile, has decried the whole thing as a “hoax,” accused the FBI of “planting information” during their search, and — on Friday morning — reached waaay back into his deflective bag of tricks to claim that “word is” former President Barack Obama was actually the one who absconded with nuclear secrets.
And yet, as the Justice Department indicated Thursday in its filing to unseal the warrant used in the raid, there was some significant national security justification for the search request, given that it was signed not only by a U.S. attorney, but also Jay Bratt, head of the DOJ’s Counterintelligence and Export Control division.
Given the potential severity of the situation, you might expect even Trump’s most ardent supporters in Congress to recognize how deeply messed up this whole thing is, right? Oh you sweet, summer child, these are congressional Republicans we’re talking about! Which is how we ended up with these gems when a gaggle of House GOP members held a press conference Friday morning:
Hey man, what even are nuclear secrets, anyway? Maybe YOU have some on your iPhone 6S! Besides, [extremely internet pedant voice] her emails!!!
In fact, when asked about Thursday’s attempted mass shooting at an FBI office in Cincinnati, Ohio — one seemingly prompted by conspiratorial anger over the Mar-a-Lago raid — some of the lawmakers chose instead to focus on the congressional baseball game shooting that occurred five years ago in a desperate attempt to counterbalance an attack that was attempted by one of the former president’s supporters just one day earlier.
So here we are: A former president who may have taken his nuclear football and gone home, and a hoard of enablers who’d rather talk baseball and aliens. It’s all pretty bad. And if past is anything like prologue, it’ll only get so much worse — and so much stupider — from here.
