The former President was caught red-handed hiding top secret documents at his freakin' vacation home, with probable intent to commit espionage against the United States, including disclosure of sensitive human intelligence assets ...
And Hacker News has it's knickers in a knot because the FBI warned a social media company that the Hunter Biden story might be a Russian psyops campaign?
> The former President was caught red-handed hiding top secret documents at his freakin' vacation home
No, he did not "hide" the documents. As a letter quoted in a recent article in Politico [1] shows, the documents were removed from the White House when the administrations changed on Jan. 20, 2021. Which means whoever was responsible for checking documents that were removed from the White House by the outgoing President and his staff screwed up. And now they're in CYA mode.
> with probable intent to commit espionage
You have no evidence whatever to back up this claim.
You are talking about national library archive stuff, not something they brought home. Or do you have source about former presidents with classified docs at home for writing memories? I don't.
Nice way of deflecting blame there. Trump knew exactly what he was doing and he did it. He now got caught. It’s not like “hey nobody told me I couldn’t do this”, it’s why tf are you taking these documents sir. There’s no interpretation of reality which makes that an accident or oversight.
The recently released affidavit is the source for this. He was told to return the docs, claimed he returned them all, and in fact when the search was conducted it was found that he didn’t.
Trump was given 18 months to return them with multiple requests, attested through a lawyer in an affidavit that he did, and yet did not. Then when caught he has made claims that they were his documents and that’s why they were not returned. So far he hasn’t made any defense that is was an accident or an oversight. This shows the possession of the docs was willful, and intentionally not returning them was obstruction.
It was not accident: Trump claims it's his right to keep his records and even publicly displayed some of them for prestige after demands for their return began. Some "accident"!
It was not CYA: The National Archives and DoJ spent 20 months exhausting all legal means to force the return of the documents to a safe facility. Trump's people according to the facts had around 16 months of escalating demands to actually do the return. Had they returned the documents during any of the many, many demands spanning multiple escalating agencies, it would have been a "no harm no foul" situation and no one would know.
When they finally returned some of the documents, it became evident that there were many more missing and the matter was referred to the DoJ. The DoJ Investigated, escalated and demanded the return.
And even then, surveillance footage shows documents being removed from the room to an unknown location. Despite there being two remaining groups of missing documents, Trump's lawyers signed a document saying there were no documents left (this is obstruction of justice multiple times -- hiding docs after the subpoena, lying about it, etc).
This is when the situation went from "maybe accident" to "definitely a serious crime". The FBI absolutely knew there were more documents, the former President was openly lying about it in court, AND there was a potential second additional unsecured cache of documents that had seen being removed on surveillance.
This is when we get to the search warrant, the final and last straw in a 20 month long quest to return some of the most highly classified secrets possible. And even now after the seizure they do not have all the documents.
>You have no evidence whatever to back up this claim.
Ironic statement from someone arguing directly against the facts while making up narratives like "it was an accident, it was CYA" which Trump himself openly denies. But that's normal for those who defend Trump to find that he has publicly undercut their narratives.
Seriously, it's all in the doc above.
But if we want to think beyond the actual legal filing, consider this article from the NYT ~9 months after the theft of top secret information that we know was classified in a way to protect the identities of American agents abroad. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/us/politics/cia-informant...
> It was not CYA: The National Archives and DoJ spent 20 months exhausting all legal means to force the return of the documents to a safe facility.
You're missing the point: the documents should never have left the White House in the first place. Whoever was supposed to check that screwed up. If they're going to throw the book at Trump for keeping them instead of giving them back, they should also be throwing the book at whoever screwed up by letting them out of the White House in the first place. And the Biden administration should have some explaining to do about that. Is anyone asking them? Hollow laugh.
I have no problem with prosecuting people who violate the law. What I have a problem with is extravagantly one-sided reporting, intended to further polarize the country for political gain. The sooner we the people realize that all politicians are crooks and all government is untrustworthy and all media is corrupt, and stop jumping on bandwagons just because someone says something we like without exercising any critical thinking, the better off we'll be.
>You're missing the point: the documents should never have left the White House in the first place. Whoever was supposed to check that screwed up. If they're going to throw the book at Trump for keeping them instead of giving them back, they should also be throwing the book at whoever screwed up by letting them out of the White House in the first place. And the Biden administration should have some explaining to do about that. Is anyone asking them? Hollow laugh.
What? This is nonsense. Trump can pack and keep things. You honestly think some Secret Service agent is supposed to draw a weapon on the exiting President to force him to leave things behind? Get real. Trump can take what he wants, and he was very proud of what he took, and he publicly claims it is his belongings.
This blame-shifting and removing the agency of the previous President is outrageous. He's not a child, he knows what he did, and he's proud of it.
>I have no problem with prosecuting people who violate the law. What I have a problem with is extravagantly one-sided reporting, intended to further polarize the country for political gain. The sooner we the people realize that all politicians are crooks and all government is untrustworthy and all media is corrupt, and stop jumping on bandwagons just because someone says something we like without exercising any critical thinking, the better off we'll be.
This is exactly the kind of both-sides-ism that leads to exact kind of worst-of-all-time corruption like Trump. There is simply no comparison to those 4 years to any other President of any party.
The ill informed hide behind the cheap cynicism of "everyones bad". It takes intellectual bravery to learn, assess, and decide that maybe, just maybe, some things are worse than others.
Why? There are laws about classified material, and they apply to former Presidents.
> Trump can pack and keep things...Trump can take what he wants
You're contradicting yourself. Either Trump violated laws or he didn't. Before you said he did. But here you're saying he didn't. Which is it? If he's in violation of the law now, then he was in violation of the law when he took the stuff in the first place, which means he can't "take what he wants".
What is supposed to happen is that anything the former President wants to take gets checked (not by the Secret Service, by the FBI or the White House staff's in-house security people who are responsible for classified material) to make sure it's not something that requires special handling, like, you know, classified material.
> There is simply no comparison to those 4 years to any other President of any party.
>Why? There are laws about classified material, and they apply to former Presidents.
Ah, I see, you're naive enough to think that the Secret Service (or any LEO) are crime-preventers instead of crime-janitors. What an interesting world you think we live in. There are laws, they do apply, and this 20-month process culminating in a search warrant and future indictment is that legal process. And the secret service, as crime-janitors, likely did give testimony to a grand jury.
>You're contradicting yourself. Either Trump violated laws or he didn't
No I'm not. Trump can pack his things and commit a crime by taking them. Just like you can walk into a 7/11 grab a coke and walk out. That's a crime. You can do it. Trump can pack TS/SCI reports into a box and take them.
There would be no point in having a punishment for taking classified materials if in fact it was impossible to do so.
>What is supposed to happen is that anything the former President wants to take gets checked (not by the Secret Service, by the FBI or the White House staff's in-house security people who are responsible for classified material) to make sure it's not something that requires special handling, like, you know, classified material
This is completely irrelevant. Because even if this doesn't happen, then the Archives will say "Hey you missed some stuff, send it on over, thanks" and a law-abiding President/staff will say "Okie-dokie!" and the entire issue is solved.
Blame-shifting to the move-out is a red herring because that was just opportunity #1 out of 20 to handle the documents in a law-abiding way. Trump still had violate #2, #3, #4, all the way down the line before "subpoena" and "search warrant" happened. You can't just hyper-fixate on one event. Read the timeline I posted, it's a 20 month event.
>Your ignorance of history is appalling.
Your defense of the indefensible is pathetic. If you had the intellectualism to match your insults, you would have simply said the 4 year Presidency that was obviously worse. You would simply have said "Hah! Had you known about Taft, you would not say this!" But because you know of no 4 year period worse, you simply insult me as if doing so is a suitable replacement for an actual argument.
As I have posted deep sourcing for the facts I stated here including the only 1st-party evidence in the thread, and I think this is just a very angry young person, I am going to leave this thread. Have fun!
Most of your post is not even worth responding to. But I'll take a few stabs:
> Your defense of the indefensible is pathetic.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that I am defending Trump. I can only attribute this to poor reading comprehension, since I explicitly said that I have no problem with prosecuting people who violate the law.
I am simply pointing out that the fact that Trump was wrong (if he was--it looks like a court will end up deciding that) does not make the establishment right. Apparently you are naive enough to think that the only reason the establishment ever trumpets this kind of pursuit of a person is that they are faultless champions of law and justice. What an interesting world you think we live in.
> If you had the intellectualism to match your insults, you would have simply said the 4 year Presidency that was obviously worse.
If you had the historical knowledge to match your supercilious smugness, you would not need me to tell you. But since you ask (and leaving out the current administration, since I did say "history", although I think the current administration has already done worse things that the Trump administration did, the Afghanistan debacle being just one example, and it hasn't even been in office two years yet), here are just a few. I'll limit myself to just the 20th century, but there are good examples in the 19th as well (if you're looking for the true golden age of kleptocracy in the US government, the latter half of the 19th century is the place to go).
Nixon (not just Watergate, but private fantasies about nuking the Soviets, to the point where, as we now know from their memoirs, high level officials on his staff were telling everyone not to act on orders from Nixon without running it by the staff first)
Johnson (mired us in Vietnam; at least he had the decency not to run for another term)
FDR (so many things here that it would take many books to unpack them, and has, but just for starters, WW II was supposedly fought to liberate Eastern Europe from a tyrannical dictator, Hitler; yet at the end of WW II, Eastern Europe was in the hands of a much worse tyrannical dictator, Stalin, and that happened because FDR persistently sucked up to Stalin)
Wilson ("he kept us out of war" until he got us into it, and then he completely screwed up the peace, setting the stage for Nazi Germany)
Sure, none of these Presidents had, as Trump has, both the attention span and the temperament of a six year old (although Nixon often came close, and Johnson had some moments too), and they all played by the establishment's rules when doing things like talking to the press, as Trump did not. But so what? All of the things I've referred to above were worse than anything Trump did.
> I have posted deep sourcing for the facts I stated here
Apparently you are naive enough to think that the media never lies to you. What an interesting world you think we live in.
> I think this is just a very angry young person
I'll cop to "angry", sure; what person who truly believed in America's ideals wouldn't be at this point? But as for "young", I'm old enough to remember the Nixon administration. Are you?
I could as soon say to you, "At least go to Google News, search 'hunter laptop', scroll, read, and then think, if you can still manage it."
95% of you will just say "Well, this one isn't credible" or "That one is a right wing conspiracy theory." Or at least the ones emboldened to type replies will. So don't ask me to throw myself to you hyenas by linking specific sources. Google News isn't that many more clicks. I'll be busy holding my breath until the attorney general indicts his own direct reports and makes his own boss look worse.
What the FBI said may not technically have been a bold face lie. We don't have a transcript. It's a prime example of not letting the one hand know what the other is doing.
This might have actually stung a bit were it not for your pattern of posting in this way. You lot are on your 4th Eternal September since 2009, by my count.
The former President was caught red-handed hiding top secret documents at his freakin' vacation home, with probable intent to commit espionage against the United States, including disclosure of sensitive human intelligence assets ...
And Hacker News has it's knickers in a knot because the FBI warned a social media company that the Hunter Biden story might be a Russian psyops campaign?
Seriously people?