WHY DID THE FORMER PRESIDENT TAKE WHITE HOUSE DOCUMENTS?

 

                    …A caricature of how Trump is acting about the federal documents.

 

Trump thinks he is the nation’s Mob Boss, and is above the law

 

We still don’t know the exact contents of the classified and top-secret documents Donald Trump kept “stashed in his safe, closets and in his socks at Mar-a-Lago,” said Timothy O’Brian in Bloomberg.  But one central question is why?  What were the former president’s motives in taking at least 26 boxes of federal property to his Florida home?  He did this when he left the White House, and then, he was compelled to turn over one group of 15 boxes...?  Why then did he hide an additional 11 boxes of Federal documents in the Mar-a-Lago basement…?

The potential reasons range from “relatively harmless” to “deeply damaging.”  The most benign being: “Trump is a childish pack-rat who liked collecting some of the cool doodads you get your hands on as president.”  A darker possibility emerges from the fact that the former president is “saddled with about $1 billion in debt,” with his struggling Trump Organization facing massive legal and financial problems.  Did he envision selling national security and nuclear secrets to foreign governments?  It’s also not “not unreasonable to worry” that he was trying to hide evidence of compromising exchanges with foreign leaders such as Xi Jinping, Mohammed bin Salman, or Vladimir Putin.  Whatever Trump’s motivation, “the frenetic pace at which Trump has seeded the ground with lies” after the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search suggests “he has something to hide.”

Trump clearly had a “sense of entitlement” about these documents, said Steve Benen in MSNBC.com.  He reportedly referred falsely to the classified documents he often took up to his private quarters at night as “mine,” and ignored repeated, emphatic warnings from top advisers to follow security procedures and the Presidential Records Act.  Over advisers objections, he kept documents from security briefings, tweeted a sensitive spy-satellite photo from a failed missile launching in Iran and proudly showed off to visitors his “love letters” from North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

“Yes, but can anyone really rule out that Trump had nefarious motives?” Asked John Bennett in Roll Call.  The boxes of documents, stored in a country club filled with unvetted, unmonitored visitors, reportedly containing top-secret nuclear information, an intelligence dossier about French President Emmanuel Macron, and information about the Russia investigation.

Throughout his life, Trump has sought either to “increase his wealth-to-debt ratio” or “humiliate” his adversaries.  If Trump “wanted to cash in,” said Will Bunch in The Philadelphia Inquirer, his “tangled web of dealings” with Saudi Arabia suggests a possible buyer.”  The uber-wealthy Saudis want to build a nuclear plant, which could be used to produce the material for nuclear weapons.  Two weeks before the raid on Mar-a-Lago, a Saudi-backed golf tournament made “a financially rewarding stop” at Trump’s Bedminster, N.J. estate.  The Saudis gave “a whopping $2 billion” to a fledgling venture capital fund started by Trump’s son-in-law and former adviser, Jared Kushner.  “This all smells worse than a desert oil refinery and should be investigated.”

“Trump’s critics are letting their imaginations run away with them,” said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic.  They are “stirring up high expectations of finding a smoking gun of espionage or treason.” If Trump is not charged with such crimes, he will claim “exoneration.”  “Trump should be held accountable for taking the documents, which may be a felony under a law he himself signed in 2018.  “But let’s hold back on the guessing games as to his motives and let the Justice Department do its work.”

From The Washington Post to the New York Times, the opinion writers all seem to be on the same page when discussing Trump’s current document situation.  Let’s just hope that Trump’s friend, Senator Graham is wrong who said: “If Trump is charged, there will be riots in the street.”

This nation’s democracy is already in trouble.

Copyright G. Ater 2022