Donald Trump needs money. Apparently, many of the documents Trump stole from the White House are still missing. Including the binder with raw intelligence about American spies in Moscow. Are they his “get out of jail free” card?
It is as if the media does not want to confront the possibility that a former president and current candidate is actually a traitor. But consider the facts.
We are right now in the midst of the third presidential election featuring massive interference from Russian intelligence. Most recently, we found that they sent an agent to the FBI to claim that Biden had taken a bribe in Ukraine: James Comer and Jim Jordan have been running with it, trying to use this Russian disinformation to damage Biden in his run against Trump this fall.
Similarly, the 2020 and 2016 elections featured substantial and persistent interventions by Russian intelligence to help get and keep Trump elected. One of the first things Trump did when he became president in 2017 was to invite the Russian Foreign Minister and their ambassador to the U.S. for a secret meeting in the White House, where he gave them a spy we and Israel ran in Syria.
He had dozens of private phone conversations with Putin while in the White House, for which no meaningful records exist, and at Helsinki took Putin’s side against American intelligence to lie about Russian involvement in the 2016 election.
He stole thousands of top-secret (and above) classified documents from the White House, transported them to Florida, and stored them in publicly-accessible locations at Mar-a-Lago. It is the perfect way to hand off intelligence to agents of foreign governments without getting caught.
He lied to both the National Archives, the FBI, and the American people about them. And now apparently many are missing.
Did Trump sell them already? Does he now have an overseas account with the hundreds of millions he’ll need to pay off his judgements? Or is he planning to sell documents that the FBI has not yet found?
Prosecutors say that roughly 48,000 people visited Mar-a-Lago between the time in 2021 when Trump brought those documents from Washington to Florida and May 2022, when the FBI finally recovered as many as they could find. Of those people, only 2,200 had any sort of identity verification done, and only 2,900 passed through magnetometers that may have detected spying or photographing equipment.
For example, a female Chinese national, Yujing Zhang, flew into the U.S. and went to Mar-a-Lago.
When she was finally caught by the Secret Service (after having her photo taken with Trump the day before on his golf course), they discovered on her person four mobile phones, a laptop, an external hard drive, and a thumb drive that was later discovered to contain spyware. There were, back in her hotel room, an additional 9 USB drives, five SIM cards for burner phones, and a bug-tracking device that could identify hidden cameras and microphones.
She claims she’s just a tourist and is now back in China; nobody knows how much time she spent in any of the many publicly-available rooms where Trump had stored our nation’s most sensitive and secret documents, including those involving nuclear war and spying on Russia and China.
And there was the notorious Russian-speaking Ukrainian woman, Inna Yashchyshyn, who went by the pseudonym Anna de Rothschild (complete with fake passport) to gain entrance to Mar-a-Lago. She was photographed on the golf course with Trump and Lindsay Graham, before spending hours wandering around Mar-a-Lago doing nobody-knows-what.
As former CIA director John Brennan said:
“I’m sure Mar-a-Lago was being targeted by Russian intelligence and other intelligence services over the course of the last 18 or 20 months, and if they were able to get individuals into that facility, and access those rooms where those documents were and made copies of those documents, that’s what they would do.”
Most likely “Anna” and Yujing Zhang were among the least competent of the spies who visited Mar-a-Lago. The good ones we’ll probably never know about.
For example, because Trump thinks it’s “upper class” to have people working at his resort who have “European” accents, the bug-infested resort hired scores of young people from European countries, typically paying them between $11 and $12 an hour.
That would present another great opportunity for foreign governments to get their people installed there in ways that would give them plenty of time to peruse the secret documents Trump was keeping out in the open.
Most concerning, though, is a 10-inch-thick binder of raw intelligence and assessments of Russia’s efforts to help Trump become president in 2016, which included reports and details from American spies in Moscow. The binder is missing, and multiple American spies and people working for U.S. intelligence have been murdered. CNN reported about six weeks ago:
“The binder contained raw intelligence the U.S. and its NATO allies collected on Russians and Russian agents, including sources and methods that informed the U.S. 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.”
How much would Putin pay for it? Or might Trump have sold it to the Saudis, who would then launder it to the Russians, in exchange for their giving $2 billion to Jared and $1 billion to Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin? How much went to Trump, but was unreported and is sitting in an overseas account?
And what were the secret documents that Senator Rand Paul took from Trump, then hopped in a first-class seat to Moscow to hand deliver to Putin’s intelligence officers? Paul, when nailed by reporters, tried to spin it as a “private letter” of some sort, but something very, very wrong is apparently going on here.
Although Trump has been charged in Florida with multiple violations of the Espionage Act, the American press insists on referring to that as the “documents case,” a nice, anodyne sounding euphemism, instead of calling it, correctly, the “espionage case.”
From his days as a teenager screening out Black rental applicants for his father’s property until today, Trump has lived his life on the edge of the law. A New York State Supreme Court justice just ruled that he’s repeatedly enriched himself through fraud.
He is a serial criminal and a traitor to the ideals of this nation.
As Trump continues to make a mockery of our criminal justice system with his repeated appeals based on BS arguments — intended purely to delay his reckoning until he’s back in the White House and can have his tormentors arrested and imprisoned in one of the concentration camps he and Stephen Miller have planned — America’s security continues to be compromised.
At the same time, Trump is forcing Republicans like “Moscow Mike Johnson” to do Putin’s bidding: his latest project has been to block U.S. aid to Ukraine for 13 months now, and to kneecap the U.S. economy to hurt both America and Joe Biden.
And just the threat of a government shutdown will further degrade our nation’s credit rating and thus damage the economy, while a complete shutdown might cripple America all the way to the election this November (apparently what Trump and Putin are counting on).
Donald Trump is the antitheses of a patriot: even Benedict Arnold never tried anything as audacious as he did. As Jack Smith wrote in filings with Judge Aileen Cannon:
“[T]here has never been a case in American history in which a former official has engaged in conduct remotely similar to Trump’s. He intentionally took possession of a vast trove of some of the nation’s most sensitive documents—documents so sensitive that they were presented to the President—and stored them in unsecured locations at his heavily trafficked social club.
“When the National Archives and Records Administration (“NARA”) initially sought their return (before learning that they contained classified national defense information), Trump delayed, obfuscated, and dissembled. Faced with the possibility of legal action, he ostensibly agreed to comply with NARA’s requests but in fact engaged in additional deception, returning only a fraction of the documents in his possession while claiming that his production was complete.
“Then, when presented with a grand jury subpoena demanding the return of the remaining documents bearing classification markings, Trump attempted to enlist his own attorney in the corrupt endeavor, suggesting that he falsely tell the FBI and grand jury that Trump did not have any documents, and suggesting that his attorney hide or destroy documents rather than produce them to the government.
“Failing in his effort to corrupt the attorney, Trump enlisted his trusted body man, codefendant Waltine Nauta, in a scheme to deceive the attorney by moving boxes to conceal his (Trump’s) continued possession of classified documents. As a result, Trump, through his attorney, again returned only a portion of the classified documents in his possession while falsely claiming that his production was complete.
“The obstructive conduct even persisted from there. In June 2022, knowing that he had arranged for Nauta to move boxes to conceal them from Trump’s attorney, and knowing that the government had subpoenaed the security video footage that would reveal that surreptitious box movement, Trump, now joined by not only Nauta but also codefendant Carlos De Oliveira, attempted to have the information-technology manager at Mar-a-Lago delete the video footage that would show the movement of boxes.
“The defendants have not identified anyone who has engaged in a remotely similar suite of willful and deceitful criminal conduct and not been prosecuted. Nor could they.”
This corrupt agent of a foreign power has already killed over a half-million Americans with his incompetent or malicious handling of the COVID crisis and damaged the reputation of our nation all over the world.
He has the democracies of Europe terrified that Putin, with Trump’s enthusiastic “do whatever the hell you want” assent, will next turn his guns and missiles on them.
And he Is radicalized millions of our people, convincing them that elections don’t matter and democracy is so corrupt it should be replaced with a Putin-style strongman authoritarian oligarchy run by Trump himself. How much more damage are we willing to take?
Merrick Garland and his DOJ need to get some answers and share them with the American people soon. And the media should start telling the truth about Trump’s betrayal of our nation or, at the very least, start describing him as “out on bail.” You know they would be doing that daily if it were Biden or any other Democrat.
Andrew Harnik (AP)
© Thom Hartmann, used with permission. Originally published on The Hartmann Report as Why Won’t Our Media Say Donald Trump is America’s Modern-Day Benedict Arnold?
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