45th Kept Over 700 Pages of Classified
Documents, Letter Says
The letter from the National Archives, which was sent to the former illegitimate president’s lawyers, described Justice Department officials’ alarm as they realized the nature of the documents at Mar-a-Lago.
... including some related to the nation’s most covert intelligence operations...according to a letter that the National Archives sent to his lawyers this year.
The letter, dated May 10...described the state of alarm in the Justice Department as officials there began to realize how serious the documents were.
The letter, linked to below, does "describe the state of alarm." You don't have to know the author to read the alarm, it's almost panic, in her words. What a cockroach 45th is.
...
...the letter could further implicate 45th in a potential crime. It confirmed, for instance, that the former illegitimate president had kept at Mar-a-Lago documents related to Special Access Programs, some of the nation’s most closely held secrets, before the F.B.I. searched the property.
"Special Access Programs" of course necessitates a longer acronym than TS/SCI. E's and F's say hello to TS/SCI-SAP. The letter states re those: "...15 boxes of records to NARA in January 2022. In its initial review of materials within those boxes, NARA identified items marked as classified national security information, up to the level of Top Secret and including Sensitive Compartmented Information and Special Access Program materials. ... "According to NARA, among the materials in the boxes are over 100 documents with classification markings, comprising more than 700 pages. Some include the highest levels of classification, including Special Access Program (SAP) materials..."
...special access programs, a designation that is typically reserved for extremely sensitive operations carried out by the United States abroad or for closely held technologies and capabilities.
...
...negotiations [with 45th's lawyers] continued through April, even as Ms. Wall [author of the letter] alerted Mr. Trump’s lawyers about the “urgency” of the agencies’ request to see the documents, which touched on “important national security interests,” the letter said. Ms. Wall ultimately rejected Mr. Trump’s claims of executive privilege after consulting with a top Justice Department official — a decision that Mr. Biden deferred to. As Ms. Wall wrote to Mr. Corcoran, before alerting him in May that the archives would soon hand the documents to the F.B.I., “The question in this case is not a close one.”
That is what she writes and she is correct, the attempted "protective assertion of executive privilege" by 45th's lawyers is not a close one.
And of course since this is 45th the traveling clown car of lawyers is still making the rounds:
Mr. Solomon’s [a different clown lawyer] decision to release the letter did more than confirm that 45th had kept some of the country’s most highly guarded secrets in his relatively unsecured beachfront club in Florida. It also revealed that well before 45th's lawyers argued in their court filing on Monday that many of the records were protected by executive privilege, the same argument had been rejected by the White House and a top official at the Justice Department.
The court filing also appeared at times to make arguments that could ultimately harm 45th.
We Want Harm!
One long section of the motion, “President Donald J. Trump’s Voluntary Assistance,” 😂was devoted to portraying him as having fully cooperated with the archives and the Justice Department from the outset. But read in a slightly different manner, the facts laid out in the section could be construed as evidence that 45th had instead obstructed the investigation into the documents.
Before I forget, this article does not read as one written by NYT 45th-beat reporter Maggie Haberman, because it's not. There is no preening, ingratiating--LOVE YOU MAGGIE!--subtlety. It is written by Alan Feuer and him alone and has the appropriate level of bite to it.
The section noted how he willingly returned the first batch of 15 boxes to the archives, then — one day after Ms. Wall’s letter was sent to Mr. Corcoran — “accepted service of a grand jury subpoena” seeking to reclaim more documents with “classification markings.”
It also described how even after a top national security prosecutor went to Mar-a-Lago to retrieve the papers sought by the subpoena, the Justice Department felt compelled to issue a second subpoena. That was for surveillance camera footage at the property, suggesting that prosecutors were concerned that Mr. Trump and his lawyers had not been entirely forthcoming.