Mar-A-Lago Legally Searched by FBI

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canpakes
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Re: Mar-A-Lago Legally Searched by FBI

Post by canpakes »

ajax18 wrote:
Sat Aug 13, 2022 9:48 pm
huckelberry wrote:
Sat Aug 13, 2022 4:35 pm


This is the first time I have heard any consideration of such an extreme possibility. (I guess Trump's action is supposed to be ok if it does not start nuclear war.) Perhaps if I watched more fox I would have heard this extreme diversion of attention.
Obama still hasn't digitized as he promised the 30 million pages he took to chicago after leaving office. LBJ's library took over 40 years to make public his secret tapes. Of course as president Obama can declassify anything for whtever he wants. But so can Trump.

Someone is yankin’ yer chain again.

NARA is in possession of all records that are to be digitized and moved them to a storage facility that NARA manages. The decision to digitize these, as opposed to housing them in a library, was NARA’s. Obama will fund this digitization process as it progresses.

https://www.archives.gov/press/press-re ... 17/nr17-54

The digitization process was put on hold during the pandemic and isn’t complete yet. In the meantime, you can access any of the records intended for digitization through FOIA request.

A lot of things are classified because it's embarrassing to the party in power classifying them, not because they are a security threat.

Arguably, the same can be said for classified docs that end up being carted off and stuffed into a dark room at the Mar-a-Lago, right?
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Re: Mar-A-Lago Legally Searched by FBI

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Our modern day Benedict Arnold is now making yet another lame excuse...

Trump Claims He Had A 'Standing Order' That Made It OK To Take Classified Docs
Trump now appears to have landed on an old standby, claiming victimhood because he supposedly didn’t do anything wrong to begin with. He had already declassified everything that had been taken to Mar-a-Lago, Trump argued on Truth Social, the platform he founded after being kicked off Twitter. Trump’s camp sent a statement to Fox News elaborating on that defense.

“As we can all relate to, everyone ends up having to bring home their work from time to time. American presidents are no different,” the statement read.

It continued: “President Trump, in order to prepare for work the next day, often took documents, including classified documents, to the residence. He had a standing order that documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them.”

Trump has not held the job of president of the United States, however, in more than 18 months, a point the statement did not seem to address.

Although presidents can declassify certain information, there is a formal process for doing so, and it is not clear whether Trump followed it.

Additionally, it appears unlikely he held the authority to declassify some of what was potentially contained in the documents ― like information on spies and nuclear weapons. The Washington Post reported earlier in the week that there was information on the U.S. nuclear arsenal among the materials at Mar-a-Lago. (Trump called the report a “hoax.”)

Presidents are required to turn over documents to the National Archives under the 1978 Presidential Records Act. But the National Archives was reportedly aware for months that Trump had been skirting those rules; over a dozen boxes of documents were recovered earlier this year.

Attorney General Merrick Garland suggested this week that authorities searched Trump’s home and office because they exhausted other options to recover what appears to be highly sensitive information. On Monday, according to the unsealed search and seizure warrant, FBI agents took more than 20 boxes of material along with other items labeled top secret. Some were even described as “various classified/TS/SCI documents,” using the abbreviation for “sensitive compartmented information.” Such information is supposed to be viewed in a special, secure facility called a SCIF.

If Trump truly had a “standing order” to declassify anything he took home, it has not been made public.

Trump allies have argued that the classification status of these materials was probably nothing more than a clerical error ― that is, Trump declared the documents to be declassified but they were never formally marked that way.

Conservative attorney Jonathan Turley told Fox News on Friday that the end of Trump’s term was a “very chaotic time” with the Capitol attack and “all the controversies.” The Trump administration may not have had time to go through the usual process, he said.

Kash Patel, a top Pentagon staffer and Trump adviser, similarly told Breitbart News that the markings were never updated. Patel claimed he was “there with Trump when he said, ‘We are declassifying this information,’” Breitbart reported.

But the rules are there for a reason. A former FBI special agent, Asha Rangappa, explained how the declassification process was supposed to work in a series of tweets that emphasized the effect it has on national security. The process, she argued, ensures that federal agencies can make the correct preparations.

“If someone is declassifying information that impacts sources and methods, it offers time to protect them or prepare for blowback,” Rangappa said.

However, a standing declassification order from Trump would be “insane to try to enforce,” Bradley Moss, a national security attorney and frequent Trump critic, said.

“That would mean staff officials would have to follow him to the residence every single time he brought those documents with him to make sure to cross out markings and stamp it ‘declassified’ so that other officials when they saw it, knew to handle it as declassified,” Moss said Friday night on MSNBC.

“You don’t get to declassify something just for yourself. You declassify it for everything,” added Neal Katyel, who served as an acting solicitor general of the United States in the Obama years, in the same segment.

Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear historian, said in an interview with Vox that the ranks of classification are supposed to correspond to how damaging the information would be to the nation if it were released. It could be very damaging if Trump had a document saying the U.S. acknowledges that Israel has a nuclear arsenal, Wellerstein said as an example. (The U.S. does not officially acknowledge Israeli nukes.)

Whether or not the Mar-a-Lago materials were technically classified or declassified, however, could be beside the point.

The unsealed warrant revealed that the Department of Justice was investigating Trump under several statutes. None of them require that the information be classified, former U.S. attorney and legal commentator Barb McQuade pointed out in an early Saturday appearance on MSNBC.

“Classification is irrelevant. Government documents that pertain to the national defense may not be withheld from the government upon request for return,” McQuade said in a tweet. “The obstruction charge in the warrant suggests Trump tried to conceal what he had.”
And now we know that he did obstruct by lying about not having them.

And the MAGA racists will cheer him on, because the "party of law and order" only cares about the rule of law when black or brown people get stopped at a traffic stop or the border. Otherwise, rich white men are super privileged. So much so that his entire racist entourage is cheering him on even as the FBI has him dead to rights. How dare they do their job and enforce the law when one of their own turns out to be every bit the lawless criminal we've been warning about?
"I am not an American ... In my view premarital sex should be illegal ...(there are) mentally challenged people with special needs like myself- Ajax18
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Re: Mar-A-Lago Legally Searched by FBI

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Vēritās wrote:
Sat Aug 13, 2022 10:10 pm
“President Trump, in order to prepare for work the next day, often took documents, including classified documents, to the residence. He had a standing order that documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them.”
Lol. No review, no redacting. Just, “I walked out of the building with them, so they’re no longer classified, and I can do what I want with them.”

Gotta admit, this reasoning is very Trump. So very Trump.

But, I have to wonder if he still had the documents at Mar-a-Lago because he thinks that he’s still President, or because he never even finished all of that ‘work’ that he took home?
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Re: Mar-A-Lago Legally Searched by FBI

Post by MeDotOrg »

canpakes wrote:
Sat Aug 13, 2022 10:17 pm
Lol. No review, no redacting. Just, “I walked out of the building with them, so they’re no longer classified, and I can do what I want with them.”

Gotta admit, this reasoning is very Trump. So very Trump.
Trump? No, think Louis XIV. This line of reasoning goes way back.

'L'etat c'est moi'

Image

So you're clear on the difference, here is Versailles:

Image

...and here is Mar-a-Lago:

Image

See? Mar-a-Lago has electric lights. Totally different.
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Re: Mar-A-Lago Legally Searched by FBI

Post by Res Ipsa »

ajax18 wrote:
Sat Aug 13, 2022 9:48 pm
huckelberry wrote:
Sat Aug 13, 2022 4:35 pm


This is the first time I have heard any consideration of such an extreme possibility. (I guess Trump's action is supposed to be ok if it does not start nuclear war.) Perhaps if I watched more fox I would have heard this extreme diversion of attention.
Obama still hasn't digitized as he promised the 30 million pages he took to chicago after leaving office. LBJ's library took over 40 years to make public his secret tapes. Of course as president Obama can declassify anything for whtever he wants. But so can Trump.

A lot of things are classified because it's embarrassing to the party in power classifying them, not because they are a security threat.
Obama didn’t take those documents to Chicago. The National Archives did. Don’t you get tired of repeating lies?
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Re: Mar-A-Lago Legally Searched by FBI

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ajax18 wrote:
Sat Aug 13, 2022 9:48 pm
Obama still hasn't digitized as he promised the 30 million pages he took to chicago after leaving office. LBJ's library took over 40 years to make public his secret tapes. Of course as president Obama can declassify anything for whtever he wants. But so can Trump.
The laws about presidents taking their documents after leaving office came after LBJ. It was part of the whole Watergate thing. I wasn't alive when it happened, but I'm guessing you might have heard of it.

As far as a president's power to declassify things goes, you're right. However, there's a process that must be followed. Kinda like how I can admit people to services as an RN, but I have to follow procedure to make it legit. I can't just say they're admitted without doing an assessment and paperwork.
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Re: Mar-A-Lago Legally Searched by FBI

Post by Chap »

Res Ipsa wrote:
Sun Aug 14, 2022 1:46 am
ajax18 wrote:
Sat Aug 13, 2022 9:48 pm


Obama still hasn't digitized as he promised the 30 million pages he took to chicago after leaving office. LBJ's library took over 40 years to make public his secret tapes. Of course as president Obama can declassify anything for whtever he wants. But so can Trump.

A lot of things are classified because it's embarrassing to the party in power classifying them, not because they are a security threat.
Obama didn’t take those documents to Chicago. The National Archives did. Don’t you get tired of repeating lies?
The bigger the lie, the more important it is that the lie should be repeated, louder and more and more often. That's what lies are for.

Obama does not have custody of those documents, and he did not "take them to Chicago". The NARA (National Archives and Research Administration) holds them, as the law dictates.

And no President can simply declassify Top Secret documents by simply utterance. There are procedures of evaluation that must be followed, and there is no evidence that Trump has ever done that. And given the status of some of the documents recovered by the FBI as TS/SCI, it is inconceivable that any President could ever have succeeded in declassifying them - statute law appears to apply here.
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Re: Mar-A-Lago Legally Searched by FBI

Post by Gunnar »

Evidence Suggests Trump Tried to Sell Out America for Profit
Despite Donald Trump’s many campaign rally boasts that he knows “everything” about nuclear energy, he can’t tell you the difference between an atomic bomb and a hydrogen bomb. He’s a con artist, a know-nothing without even rudimentary knowledge of nuclear weaponry (the subject of Barack Obama’s senior college thesis) or national security.

What Trump does know is this: Foreign governments whose dictatorial leaders he admires–North Korea, Russia and Saudi Arabia among them–would pay fortunes to acquire America’s most sensitive nuclear secrets. And what Donald knows is how to find buyers who will pay premium prices for whatever he has to unload.

What had been the unthinkable idea that any American president would sell our national security secrets is suddenly front and center. From private citizen Trump’s Florida home the FBI recovered extensive national security materials belonging to our government. No previous American president has been the subject of a criminal investigation, much less one that raises the question of disloyalty for profit.

We should view this week’s events and what follows remembering a 2019 congressional investigation that drew only momentary attention. A rich trove of evidence showed that the Trump administration was lackadaisical about Saudi and corporate efforts to obtain our government’s nuclear secrets.

Journalists covering the FBI and national security also report that signals intelligence materials were also recovered during the search, which adds to concern about what foul deeds Trump was doing.

Ask yourself this: What legitimate reason could Donald Trump possibly have to take to Mar-a-Lago what’s known in spy world as SIGINT or signals intelligence? Our National Security Agency silently gathers SIGINT from telephone calls, emails and heavily encrypted electronic messaging. No private citizen has any business holding such records.

Foreign powers, especially those hostile to the United States, would pay vast sums, potentially billions of dollars, to access our SIGINT. They would look for details about our capacity to intercept such signals and hints to help them identify our spies and human assets in those countries so they could be captured, tortured and liquidated.

The Right Question

We don’t know for sure what, if anything, Trump sold, attempted to sell or left open for his Mar-a-Lago guests to peruse. That’s what trial after indictment is for, although public hearings by Congress would also be a brilliant idea.

But the question to ask now is this: What in hell was he doing with these materials? And why didn’t he turn them over when he was issued a subpoena for them months ago?

It’s hard to imagine any other reason Trump would take from the White House government documents so vital to our national security that authorized officials can examine them only in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility or SCIF (pronounced skiff). The same holds for even talking about them. These are documents that Trump has no intellectual capacity to understand and no conceivable legitimate reason to possess.

Trump believes that while in office he had the power to declassify any document. If he is brought to trial by our federal government, as I fully expect, he would almost certainly assert this as a defense. That would be a typical Trumpian effort to muddy the waters and sow doubt about criminal intent among jurors. The likely defense claim would be that he thought he acted appropriately and made an honest mistake.

Crucial 1946 Law

But what Trump almost certainly doesn’t know is that the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 governs nuclear secrets. Under that law, a president cannot unilaterally declassify materials. Any declassification involves a complex process requiring approval by experts in nuclear weaponry and national security.

Should a federal grand jury indict Trump under that 1946 statute, his ignorance of the law would be no defense.

Clearly, Donald Trump had no right to take any national security documents. He is now just another private citizen. His possession of these secrets is a federal felony. Prosecution is necessary if he held such documents, especially if any evidence exists showing Trump tried to sell out America for profit.

This is true even though Trump claims he is above the law.

Claim of Unlimited Power

“When somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total and that’s the way it has to be,” Trump said in 2020. He instantly rejected challenging questions from reporters who understand the limited and temporary power granted to presidents by Article II of our Constitution. He’s also wrongly asserted that our Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want.”

Keep in mind that at issue here are not mundane documents of no consequence but our most sensitive nuclear and intelligence secrets, which only a handful of closely vetted individuals are allowed to see. The FBI would never have conducted a raid over documents of little value. If these were mundane documents, Trump would be claiming that and showing the inventory of items taken, which FBI agents turned over as they departed Mar-a-Lago.

That 2019 congressional investigation, cited above, showed that Saudi Arabia was trying to buy our nuclear secrets. Astonishingly Trump wasn’t alarmed about this. Indeed, the report indicates that Trump viewed our relationship with that country entirely in financial terms, just as he does everything else.

Love and Facts

At campaign rallies, Trump repeatedly praised the Saudis. He declared his love for them because they had put so much money in his pocket by buying apartments for tens of millions of dollars each and staying at his hotels and golf resorts.

The little-noticed 2019 congressional investigation began after multiple whistleblowers came forward to warn about efforts inside the White House to rush the transfer of U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia.

Keep this in mind in the context of four facts:

1. Trump’s refusal to sanction the Saudi regime for murdering an American journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, in a Saudi consulate. Our government
concluded the de facto dictator, Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, ordered his most trusted guards to kill.

2. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner developed a very close relationship with MBS, as the dictator is known, during the Trump era. They had hours-
long, late-night telephone calls.

3. The $2 billion that MBS gave Kushner to manage despite warnings by numerous Saudi financial advisers that Kushner lacked competency in money management and charged outrageously high fees.

4. Trump took the side of the Saudis and their friends in the United Arab Emirates against the government of Qatar, home to America’s most
important military base in the Middle East, after the Qataris declined to extend a risky $800 million loan to Kushner.

That Donald Trump overrode the objections of national security experts and granted security clearances to his son-in-law Kushner and his daughter Ivanka, Kushner’s wife, assumes even greater importance in light of the events this week. They repeatedly revised the SF-86 forms that all candidates for security clearances must submit. A single omission or misstatement typically results in denying a security clearance. Trump approved his daughter and son-in-law despite many revisions and against the advice of security experts.

How these facts connect, if indeed they do, won’t be known for some time. But keeping these acts and connections in the forefront of your mind will help you understand what happens as this case progresses.

To be clear, we don’t know what the search warrant specified, a warrant that was calmly and professionally delivered on midmorning Monday by FBI agents wearing suits and in the presence of Trump lawyers. However, we know that this search was so vital to our national security that Attorney General Merrick Garland personally approved the search. A federal magistrate authorized the search after being presented with an affidavit showing probable cause that Donald Trump committed crimes against the United States.

The harsh reality is that what’s going on is worse than you think.

P.S.: An atomic bomb uses fission to create an explosion, while a hydrogen bomb momentarily uses fusion, which powers our sun, to produce a much more powerful blast.
As concluded by the article, the harsh reality is far, far worse than what Binger and Hawkeye are willing to admit! The whataboutism pushed by Hawkeye about the supposed ill supported claims of about HC and Obama's misdeeds, even if they were true, don't even begin to hold a candle to what Trump and his administration have tried and are still trying to get away with!

It is astonishing to me how in the course of this thread how oblivious those two remain to the fact that they have only succeeded in making themselves seem ever more and more ridiculous and irrational by their own arguments!
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Re: Mar-A-Lago Legally Searched by FBI

Post by Moksha »

Res Ipsa wrote:
Sun Aug 14, 2022 1:46 am
Don’t you get tired of repeating lies?
If Fox or Breitbart lies, Ajax is under contract to keep repeating it. The dissemination of false information is now critical to the conservative message. Likewise, he is duty bound to support all of Trump's criminality.
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Re: Mar-A-Lago Legally Searched by FBI

Post by Gunnar »

Moksha wrote:
Sun Aug 14, 2022 1:11 pm
Res Ipsa wrote:
Sun Aug 14, 2022 1:46 am
Don’t you get tired of repeating lies?
If Fox or Breitbart lies, Ajax is under contract to keep repeating it. The dissemination of false information is now critical to the conservative message. Likewise, he is duty bound to support all of Trump's criminality.
It sure seems that way, more than ever before!

Hawkeye, in the light of the increasingly abundant and incontrovertible evidence of Trump's guilt, are willing to admit at least the possibility that you are mistaken about Trump, and that Breitbart might not be a trustworthy source, are you going to continue to refuse to even consider the damning evidence, or worse yet, continue to perpetuate the dissemination of outright lies on Trump's behalf?
Last edited by Gunnar on Sun Aug 14, 2022 4:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
No precept or claim is more suspect or more likely to be false than one that can only be supported by invoking the claim of Divine authority for it--no matter who or what claims such authority.
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